Past fast-food places and car repair shops and video stores. I was still running, but now I was off the path, heading away from the finish line, past the cars in the parking lot, the flagpole, and the HOME OF THE LIONS sign. Muffled applause, the weak sputtering of gloved hands clapping. And I knew then that if I couldn’t see her, no one could see me. But what scared me, really scared me, was that I couldn’t remember the moment when I’d stopped seeing her. She leaned in around a corner, I leaned in around a corner. My feet went where her feet had just been. The soles of her sneakers swam up and down in front of me, first one, then the other, a grid of ridges that spelled out the upside-down name of the shoe company. Our shadows passed along the ground slantwise slowly they merged, then her shadow passed mine. We were the only ones left in the last stretch of the course, the part that winds through the woods and comes out behind the school. Everybody-except a girl from the other team. Everybody had passed me, just like the week before and the week before that. It was at the last cross-country meet, right around the four-mile mark.

“Can you remember how it started?” you say. Your stockinged legs make a shushing sound as you cross them. Like the cow it used to be before somebody killed it and turned it into a chair in a shrink’s office in a loony bin. You lean forward, place a box of tissues in front of me, and your black leather chair groans like a living thing. I’m deeply grateful to The Writers Room, an oasis of serenity in downtown New York to the Vermont College graduate program in writing for young people, which supported my work at a crucial juncture to my friends Bridget Starr Taylor, Hallie Cohen, Annie Pleshette Murphy, Chris Riley, Joan Oziel, Joan Gillis, Meg Drislane, Anna An, and Cathy Bailey, who believed in this story even when I didn’t to Katya Rice who copy edited with sensitivity and good cheer to Carolyn Coman, the first person to call these pages a book and to Stephen Roxburgh, my editor and publisher and most of all to my family, Paul, Meaghan, Matt, and Brandon, who have taught me so much about love and honesty. Summary: While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.

This Library of Congress CIP Data refers to the hardcover edition Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law. This work is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Namelos Copyright © 2000 by Patricia McCormick Published by arrangement with Boyds Mills Press, Inc.

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