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flushing with sudden heat. I don’t think Kylee heard, and if she did, she probably wouldn’t care. She’d just say, My grandma loved to knit, and I’m glad I’m like her. If she knew how angry I feel right now at Olivia, she’d be puzzled, like, Who cares what Olivia thinks about anything? That is another huge difference between Kylee and me. And maybe I wouldn’t care if Olivia said something like that about me —except that I would—but I totally care if she says it about Kylee . I think when we love someone we care about them more than we do about ourselves.
    Suddenly, I know what I want to write about.
    I want to write about my best gift ever .
    Now I can’t stop my pen from flying across the page.
    I’m five, and I’m afraid of the dark, because as soon as it’s dark, there’s this cubbyhole in my bedroom under the eaves behind a little square door with a little round doorknob, and when it’s totally dark, the doorknob turns, and the door creaks open, and Mrs. Whistlepuff comes out. She’s all made of a cold, cold wind, a bad-smelling wind, like the wind that blows in from a garbage dump. She tries to blow my covers off, and no matter how I pull on them to hold them tight, I can feel her tugging, too. I know if she gets the covers off, she’ll breathe on me, and if Mrs. Whistlepuff breathes on you, you die. I can’t scream because Mrs. Whistlepuff sucks all my breath away, and I can’t tell my parents because my father took the night-light out of my room because five-year-olds are big girls who don’t need night-lights anymore. I have to be a big girl now, even if it means Mrs. Whistlepuff is going to kill me.
    The only person I tell is Hunter. He’s eight, and he’s not afraid of anything.
    He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say, “There’s no such person as Mrs. Whistlepuff.”
    He rides his bike all by himself to the store a few blocks from our house and comes back with something hidden under his jacket. My parents don’t know where he went, and they’re furious, and they take his bike away for a week, because he’s not allowed to leave without letting them know where he’s going.
    The thing he had hidden under his coat is a flashlight. For me. And batteries, too, and he even knew which kind of batteries to get, and how to put the batteries in, with the plus and minus ends in the right place, and everything.
    Now when it’s dark, dark, dark in my room, and I hear the doorknob turn and the door start to creak open, I shine the flashlight over to the cubby, and Mrs. Whistlepuff has to go back inside and stay there.
    And she never bothers me again.
    The end.
    Except it’s not the end. The end is how Hunter read my poem aloud to his friends, and they all laughed.
    I don’t have that flashlight anymore. I’m not sure if Hunter bought it for me with his birthday money or swiped it the way he swiped a chocolate bar—and got in big trouble—a few weeks later.
    I just remember how bright its beam was.
    I just remember how it let me be safe in my bed again through the night.
    Cameron is writing now, too, intently bent over his page, his hand at that awkward angle left-handed people use when they write. I still don’t know what he’s writing about. He acted pretty normal today, all things considered—that is to say, normal for someone who isn’t like anybody else I’ve ever known. Maybe David took pity on me and didn’t tell him? Maybe David told him, and Cameron didn’t even care?
    Somehow that last possibility seems the worst of all.

 
    5
    After school on Tuesday I’m sitting in the backseat of my mom’s Subaru Outback, eyes scrunched shut, waiting to die.
    â€œHunter,” Mom says to my brother, who is at the wheel. “You need to check the mirrors. All the mirrors. Rearview mirror. Both side mirrors.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to