1. THE CURSE

When I was thirteen, I ran away from home because of a curse.

Mom caught up with me miles out in the country, standing in front of an abandoned grain silo. The sky was full of what looked like baby tornadoes. I had just been examined pretty thoroughly by a three-legged dog. I was sweaty, thirsty, filthy with road dust, and my heart was completely fractured.

Mom turned the car around and headed back to the apartment, yelling the whole way how badly I had frightened her. I turned my head to the window to shut her out. I just wasn't up for it. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel like fighting back. I was broken in too many places.

Instead I thought about the curse, how crazy it had been to try to outrun it. How do you run away from something that's inside you?

But I had learned something from walking all that way. I had learned the world was an amazingly big and strange and unknown place. There could be anything out there. Anything at all. Even something evil. I wouldn't have believed that then. I believe it now.


Four years later I was sitting in that same junky old car and we were headed east toward the north Georgia mountains. This time the sky was dotted with innocent-looking spring clouds. Mom was driving and my sister, Manda, was shrieking Disney Channel tunes in the backseat, helping me to get my game face on.

After we crossed the state line, the landscape began to change. We passed through sagging towns that could have been renamed Foreclosureville, then nothing but red clay fields, mossy farms, and small, lonely houses clinging to rocky hillsides.

In the last clear place before the mountains I saw a slash in the fores...