So that was the family. Momma, Pappy Gatmuss, Charyat, and me. I didn't have any friends. Demons my age didn't want to be seen with me. I was an embarrassment, coming from such a messed-up family. They'd throw stones at me, to drive me away, or excrement. So I kept myself from becoming a lunatic by writing down all my frustrations on anything that would carry a mark — paper, wood, even bits of linen — which I kept hidden under a loose floorboard in my room. I poured everything into those pages. It was the first time I understood the power of what you're looking at right now. Words. I found over time that if I wrote on my pages all the things I wished I could do to the kids who humiliated me, or to Pappy Gatmuss (I had some fine ideas about how I would make him regret his brutalities), then the anger would not sting so much. As I got older and the girls I liked threw stones at me just like their brothers had only a few years before, I'd go back home and spend half the night writing about how I'd have my revenge one day. I filled page after page after page with all my plans and plots, until there were so many of them that I could barely fit them into my hidey-hole under the floorboard.

I should have thought of another place, a bigger place, to keep them safe, but I'd been using the same hole for so long I didn't worry about it. Stupid, stupid! One day I get home from school and race upstairs only to find that all my secrets, my Pages of Vengeance, had been unearthed. They were heaped up in the middle of the room. I'd never risked taking them all out of their hiding place together, so this was the first time I'd seen all of them at once. There were so many of them. Hundreds. For a minute I was amazed, proud even, that I'd written so much.

Then my mother comes in with such a look of fury on her face I knew I was going to get the beating of my life for this.