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following people every day after school, and nothing would come at all; sometimes they followed me; once an old man followed me, but he turned out to be real. I could see what the cat saw.
    When I was about sixteen I began to get self-conscious about all of it; it wasn’t that I minded them coming around asking and following me everywhere I went; most sixteen-year-old girls like to be followed, but by then I knew no one else was going to see them and sometimes I felt like a fool; you don’t go around staring at empty air all the time, not when you’re sixteen years old you don’t, not without people beginning to notice. “Do you need glasses?” my mother used to ask me, or “Can’t you for heaven’s sake stop gawking at nothing and shut your mouth and comb your hair and get out with the other kids?” Then sometimes for weeks at a time I would think that they had gone away, maybe for good, and I’d start taking care of my hair and putting polish on my nails and hanging around the soda shop or going to a football game, and then first thing I knew I’d be talking to someone and a face would come between us and a mouth would open saying some crazy thing, and I’d be watching and listening and whomever I had been talking to would wait for a few minutes and then get edgy and walk away while I was still listening to some other voice. After a while I just stopped talking to anybody.
    That’s not a good way for a girl to grow up. It’s easy to say that if I knew then what I know now I could have handled it better; how can anyone handle things if her head is full of voices and her world is full of things no one else can see? I’m not complaining.
    I sat in my pleasant square room at Mrs. Faun’s house and thought about it all. Ever since I can remember, I thought as quietly as I could, I have been seeing and hearing things no one else could see and hear. By now I can control the nuisance to some extent. It disappeared entirely when I married Hughie; I have reason to believe now that it is coming back. I sat in Mrs. Faun’s house and thought what good did it do to sell the house and find a new name; they don’t care what your name is when they come around asking.
    At first I tried to point them out to people; I was even foolish enough at first to think other people just hadn’t noticed; “Look at that,” I would say, “look, right over there, it’s a funny man.” It didn’t take long for my mother to put a stop to that; “There isn’t any funny man anywhere,” she would say, and jerk on my arm, “what kind of a sewer do you have for a mind?” Once I tried to tell a neighbor about it; it was quite accidental, because I rarely told anyone anything. He was sitting on his front porch one evening in summer and I had been lying on the grass on our lawn, watching small lights go and come among the grass blades, and listening to a kind of singing—sometimes, especially in summer, it was a kind of pleasant world I lived in—and he heard me laughing. He asked me to come and sit on his front porch and he gave me a glass of lemonade, and when he asked me what I had been doing I went ahead and told him. I told him about seeing and hearing, and he listened, which is more than anyone else ever did. “You’re clairvoyant,” he told me, and I always remembered that; he probably knew less than nothing about it, but he listened and said I was clairvoyant; later he told my mother I ought to be taken to some special clinic and examined, and for about three days she decided I was pregnant. I never talked to him again; I wanted to, once in a while, but he never spoke to me after that.
    I knew a lot about people, a lot that they never knew I knew, but I never seemed to have much sense, probably because one thing I never really knew was whether what I was doing was real or not.
    The house, I later found out, was almost