With her looking over my shoulder, I write about the coming of Tom Foolery and the other Eader, of my going into the woods, and what happened between us in there. I draw a picture of her holding the bear, sitting in among the pine tree roots. When I get to the end, to us sitting here on the steps and my writing in the book, I turn to her.

“Are you going to finish it?” she says.

“No, you are,” I tell her.

She looks out at the Eadar, then at Tom who gives her a wink.

“They’re all innocent, aren’t they?” she says. “They don’t know what we know.”

“They know,” I tell her. “But they didn’t have to experience it the way you and I did.”

“Why did we?”

I hold her gaze. “I don’t know why I did. But you experienced it because I was a stupid and selfish little girl. I wasn’t brave enough to keep it to myself so I made you carry it for me.”

“That’s not true,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows.

“You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“But that didn’t make it right,” I say.

She’s quick to see how we’re having the same argument we did before, except we’re arguing each other’s side of it this time.

“ I . . . I just wanted to be loved,” she says after a long moment. “By someone who didn’t want to hurt me.”

“Me, too.”

“Did you ever find that?”

I think of all my friends, from Lou and Angel, to Sophie and Wendy, Isabelle and Mona. Joe and Cassie and Christy and Saskia and the Professor. But most of all I think of Geordie, waiting for me on a mesa somewhere else in the otherworld.

“I did,” I tell her. “But it took me a long time, and it took me even longer to believe it could be true. And . . . and even now, I find it easier to believe that it’s all just a dream. That it couldn’t be real.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” she said. “If I had people who said they loved me, I’d believe it. Especially if they didn’t hit me.”

I give her a slow nod. “I guess you’re braver than I am.”

She touches a finger to the blank half page that’s still left at the end of what I’ve written.

“How does it end?” she asks.

“I really don’t know. Like I said, you have to finish it.”

She looks away then, her gaze going inward. She strokes her teddy’s head.

I don’t know how long we sit like that. Nothing changes. The Eadar don’t move or talk. The light doesn’t change—the sun just stays where it is in the sky.

“I want to grow up,” Mattie finally says when she turns back to me.