For now it was my secret.

Mine and Cass’s.

Remember how I said I never had any friends growing up? I’d like to talk about that now, if it’s okay with you. It has more than a little bit to do with my visions. See, I was homeschooled, I didn’t play sports, and I didn’t go to church hardly ever, all of which pretty much doomed me in the friend department. Besides, our neighbors were mostly old and childless, and if they did happen to breed, the kids were guaranteed to be mean-spirited rednecks. However, I did try to make friends from time to time, even though it never worked, even though it always ended in disaster.

Want to hear about the last time I ever tried making friends?

This was back when I was fourteen or so and going through a phase. The phase was that I only wore black, always, all the time. This was before I’d discovered poetry, when I was still a dork who read Hellblazer comics and listened to the Smiths all day. I had a black Punisher shirt, a black Batman shirt, and a black Green Lantern shirt. I wore those shirts in rotation pretty much all the time along with black Converse, black cotton shorts, and black socks. I even wore a blank black baseball cap sometimes, just to complete the look. I know, it was weird, but I liked it. Sometimes when Mom was drinking, she’d laugh and call me her little Johnny Cash, which I thought was badass.

I mean, to my mind I was the coolest person who ever lived. I listened to good music, I read cool comics, and I had mystical visions. Maybe somebody would actually like me now.

So I was really excited when this kid Kent Knoll moved in down the street from us. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older. Word was Kent was rich. He had a giant TV in his bedroom, which was incredible to think of, and a fish tank with all these fancy exotic ocean fish swimming around in it. Even better, Kent had a go-kart that he rode up and down our street at unbelievable speeds. Sometimes other kids would come over and ride his go-kart too. I thought that was amazing. I wanted to ride that go-kart more than I’d ever wanted to do anything in my life. I wanted to meet Kent Knoll and be his friend and have everybody like me just the same as they did him.

One night, as I was getting ready for bed, I felt something strange in my right arm. A kind of crawling, pulsating feeling, like the blood was pumping too hard in my veins, like my blood vessels were about to swell and burst.

I looked down, and I saw a weird bulge in my arm, a kind of bumpy line under the skin, a swollen spot that itched and burned.