I lean back and watch in awe as they lift off—hundreds of them, rising into the sky. It is a beautiful, triumphant, and sad thing. I don’t want them to go, but I also know they are going to a place where they belong. It’s comforting because it makes me feel like the broken things of the world have a place after all, and that they get put back together again somewhere else.

Ghosts begin to trail away to their graves as the morning arrives. Ebb and Homer wave before departing.

Germ and I watch the last of the ghosts of bugs rise into the dawn—a beautiful glowing ballet of tiny spirits.

And I don’t believe that any witch darkness could blot out the beauty of them rising.

CHAPTER 23

If Germ Bartley is a force of nature, her mother is a gentle breeze.

Mrs. Bartley is shorter than Germ and rail thin, and is always looking for someone to split a piece of toast with her because she can’t eat the whole thing (which Germ finds agonizingly funny). She has impeccable manners, but when it comes to defending Germ, she’s so fierce that all the teachers at school are scared of her. She’s also no fool—but because she can’t imagine Germ ever lying to her, she believes just about everything Germ says. One time Germ and I ate all the ice cream out of the freezer, and Germ told her we must have been sleepwalking, and Mrs. Bartley read a bunch of books on sleepwalking and made Germ do a hypnosis program to break the habit.

So when Germ tells her, after the three of us drag into the driveway of the trailer Wednesday morning, scraped and bruised and disheveled, “Rosie’s house was destroyed by a small tornado,” she believes us immediately. And when she calls the police, she tells them the same.

A thin layer of ice forms on the puddles in the yard, and icicles dangle from the eaves of the trailer. The trees beyond the junkyard are all covered in a layer of frost that sparkles in the sun.

We are interviewed and poked and prodded by three police officers, an insurance agent, and two medics. If they are concerned by the way my mom barely remembers what happened, they attribute it to the shock.

Of course, after inspecting my house and yard for themselves, they believe it was a tornado too. How else could all that destruction be explained? At one point I do float the idea that something else did it, just to test one more time if there’s any hope for help from any adults at all.

“Do you have any police tactics for handling, um, supernatural forces?” I ask. But the policewoman just blinks at me a moment and then has paramedics come to double-check my pupils to see if I’m concussed.