She had especially wondered about that because of Dennis Farman. Dennis was just a kid, like she was a kid, like Cody Roache was a kid. He had always been a bully, had always liked hurting people—maybe because his father had picked on him and hurt him, Miss Navarre had said—but why had he decided that fateful Saturday to bring a knife to the park and stab Cody and try to stab her?

Did he just go crazy? Did people just go crazy? Would she go crazy? Would her dad go crazy? Would a crazy person come in their house one night and kill them just because he felt like it?

Wendy wandered into her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, and wondered whether other people wondered these things too or whether she was losing her mind. How did people know if they were going crazy? If they were crazy didn’t they probably think they were normal, and everyone else would think they were crazy?

Just to try to do something normal, she brushed her teeth and took the scrunchie out of her hair. She had done her hair that day mostly down but with some messy sections snatched up into an off-center ponytail that looked like a blond fountain coming out the top of her head. She liked to dress like her favorite singers: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the girls in the Bangles. Although she didn’t put as much effort into it lately as she once had.

Everyone told her she looked just like her mother, which she did. They had the same thick, wavy hair that was all different shades of blond but darker at the roots. They had the same unusual blue eyes. Wendy had grown nearly two inches since fifth grade. In another year or two she would be as tall as her mother.

As she crawled under the covers of her bed she made a vow to herself not to end up as unhappy as her mother.

She snuggled her favorite brown teddy bear and kissed his nose. She was going to grow up to be a famous journalist, and she was never going to get married—until the perfect man came along.

She pressed her cheek to her bear’s head and whispered his name as she closed her eyes: “Tommy.”

Chapter 18

18

On the other side of town, in the county mental health facility, Dennis Farman wondered too, what made people crazy.

He sat on his bed in his room, all alone because there were no other kids in the place, and because people thought he was dangerous and would probably kill a roommate in his sleep. The lights in his room had been turned out for the night, but pale yellow light came in from the hall, and white-blue light came in through the window from the parking lot.