Claire Legrand

If you are afraid, sad, tired, or lonely if you feel lost or strange if you crave stories and adventure, and the magic possibility of a forest path—this book is for you

My chest is knotted up. I feel like a person standing in the middle of a crowded street. The person is screaming, but nothing is coming out, and no one’s paying attention anyway.

Everything looks like a painting: blue sky, white house, bright flowers.

How can the world look so perfect when I feel so broken?

I see adult women. My three aunts.

There are smiles, and hugs that are honestly painful to me because I’m not accustomed to strangers invading my personal space.

The wrinkle between Mom’s eyebrows vanishes. She approves.

I wish the wrinkles inside me could disappear so easily.

The longer they stay, she tells me, the harder it will be for her to leave me. And this is the right thing to do, she says. She and Dad have decided it will be good for me, to spend time with my family.

I think she sounds like she has been crying too, but I don’t want to know if that’s true.

Once she leaves the room, I lie flat and stare at the chandelier above my bed. This is a room for a princess, and I am anything but that.

What am I?

A lump of heaviness. A stranger. A thing that does not fit.

I can’t seem to stop the poison inside me from spreading.

(I mean, I’ve never been poisoned, so I am only speculating.)

(But I do feel something spreading inside me. Something heavy and dark.)

I can’t let them see it.

They can’t know my secret. Not these people in this clean, white palace. Not even Mom and Dad know. And they never will.

The Everwood won’t leave me.

The Everwood is always right here, in my notebook, on these straight lines.

The Everwood is one thing I can always understand.

Some people might think it’s odd that we hardly ever eat dinner together at the table. I like our way, though. It makes me feel grown-up, like Mom and Dad don’t have to pretend to care about typical dinnertime rituals.

We’re all adults here. We eat how we want to eat.

But dinner at Hart House is like a dance. Not only do I not know the steps, but I seem to have forgotten how to move my legs entirely.

But I am too afraid to say anything much.

I am afraid that if I open my mouth, the wrongness inside me will come gushing out.

The wrongness of using the incorrect fork.

The wrongness of not knowing that Grandma is the key.

The wrongness of the tight, jumbled knot that is my insides. And how heavy it feels. And how it is pulling and pushing and molding me like clay.

I didn’t believe them; I’d had nightmares before. This wasn’t the same thing.

I knew something must be wrong, for me to feel like that. Something deep down where no one could see.

Since then I have never told my parents when I wake up sweating, feeling hot and sick and small. Instead I write about the Everwood until nothing else matters.

I never want to scare my parents again.

I don’t want them to look at me like I am broken in a way they don’t know how to fix.

(We are already broken enough; it’s the reason I’m here.)