by Jess Howe

Created on: March 31, 2009

My teddy bear, Austin, grinned at me out of the darkness. There were a lot of shadows in the room where I used to live as a child, you see. Cobwebs hung in many corners, from beams that hadn't been dusted in decades.

"Why did you bring me here?" I wanted to know. But Austin grinned more toothily, in that "you'll find out" kind of way he always had. Austin was the most arrogant of my teddy bears, or of any of my stuffed animals for that matter. It was a good thing I didn't creep out easily, never had. I was happy anyway that the asylum had released me for a bit, for my parents' funeral. Even though I'd hated them both.

I could remember every nook and cranny of that house from feel, even though I didn't need to walk around with my eyes shut. That was just a game I'd learned at the asylum from Jumper who thought he was King Charles of Pluto and insisted on wearing as few clothes as possible in the winter. He'd killed himself in the spring as soon as he saw the first crocus, said it was unnatural. So now I was back at the old house on Memory Avenue, where the whipporwills and the northern flickers trilled oddly by the lake, and a heron stalked its boundaries looking for fish. I could see that out the window, through the moldy panes.

And I felt Austin's pebble eyes staring at me from the shadowy corner.

The room was in a gabled section of the house, with crinkly wallpaper that had never stayed up proper. The paper was covered in tiny leaves and a few rosebuds, always too delicate for my taste, like the lacy curtains. Grandma had wanted me to learn to be a "lady" and so I had, with several different finishing schools to which I'd never been allowed to take Austin until my parents learned that apparently all young ladies had stuffed animals in their dorms. Apparently all young ladies also stick frogs' legs in other peoples' beds, and hang nooses in their lockers. I learned to sleep under the bed or out on the porches; so they called me mad.

I wished evil upon all of them, and would cling tightly to Austin those nights as I cried into the rosebushes or my pillow. No one ever believed me, not really I could tell, but I was always transferred to another school. It was as if they were placating me to keep up appearances. The appearance they created was that "Lenore's a big, fat baby," and I was none of those things. A hunchback, maybe, but not a baby. I hated them.

I hated the other girls through four schools, and then something miraculous happened. One night I was sitting

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