And Geordie . . . Geordie was the first guy I ever met who didn’t betray me, who wouldn’t even think of betraying me. I mean a guy my age, because Lou’d already proven to me there were decent men in the world.

But they’re not here. Lou and Angel. Sophie and Wendy. My dear lad Geordie.

There’s only a made-up girl and her monstrous bear who hate me.

Del, and it looks like the priest.

Maybe Rob and Adrian L. Brewer, the pasty-faced freak from the last foster home I was in. I remember him the best because he was the worst that child services sent me to.

Maybe they’re all living together in the house, all my enemies under one roof.

If I had a can of gasoline, I could burn it down with them in it.

I sigh. No, I couldn’t. Oh, I could burn the house down, no question, but I wouldn’t want the deaths of even such monsters weighing down my soul.

It’s funny. Whenever I talk about this kind of thing—in my art, in out-reach programs like Angel runs—you get these people saying things like how it’s all old hat, movie-of-the-week, tearjerker crap. They’re tired of it and wish that people would just shut up and get on with their lives instead of going on and on about it. Well, we’re tired of it, too, those of us unfortunate enough to be Children of the Secret. But that didn’t stop it from happening to us and screwing up our lives. Way too many of us weren’t lucky enough to find support like I got to help me pick up the pieces of my life again.

And as being here makes it all too clear, the reality of it never really goes away, does it? It’s always there inside us, an unhappy ache that we can’t completely ease no matter how deeply we bury it.

It’s not something I think about all the time or anything, but I still wake up sweating from bad dreams where I’m that kid again, trapped in an endless cycle of being hurt. Or something I see or hear will trigger a rush of panic before I remember that I’m not there anymore.

Something like the beat-up old house sitting down there on the other side of a county road that, in this world, probably goes from nowhere to nowhere.

I have to look away. I have to get away, but I don’t know what to do, where to go, until I remember the tree. My magic tree that listened to all my stories and gifted me with her light. The one that Raylene burned down in the World As It Is.

Maybe it’s still standing, here in this world inside my head.