I was turning onto Bree's street before I remembered that we were no longer friends. If she hadn't left those books on my porch, I wouldn't know I was adopted. If Cal hadn't come between us, she would never have left the books on my porch.

I cried harder, shaking with sobs, and spun into a sloppy U-turn right before I reached her driveway. Then I hit the gas and drove, my only destination to be away, away.

The next time my vision cleared, I had managed to fish a battered box of tissues from beneath the front seat. Damp, crumpled ones littered the passenger side and covered the floor. I had ended up heading north, out of town. The road followed a low valley, and early fog clung heavily to the asphalt. Das Boot plowed through it like a brick thrown through clouds. In the distance I saw a large, dark shadow of to the side of the road. It was the willow oak that we had parked under just last night, for Samhain. Where I had parked the first time I did a circle with Cal, weeks before. When magick had come into my life.

Without thinking, I swung my car off the road and bumped across the field, rolling to a stop beneath the oak's low-hanging branches. Here I was hidden by fog; by the tree. I turned off my engine, leaned against the steering wheel, and tried to stop crying.

Adopted. Every instance, every example of my being different from my family reared up in my face and mocked me. Yesterday they had been only family jokes—how the three of them are larks and I'm a night owl, how they're unnaturally cheerful and I'm grumpy. How Mom and Mary K. are curvy and cute and I'm thin and intense. Today those jokes caused waves of pain as I remembered them one by one.

"Damn it! Damn iIt! Damn it!" I shouted, banging my fists against the hard metal steering wheel. "Damn it!" I whacked the wheel until my hands were numb, until I had gone through every curse I knew, until my throat was raw.