“Ah. Morrigan,” a voice said behind me. I jumped and spun around. Jesus. She must have been wearing super-quiet librarian shoes.”

“Personally, I felt pretty safe. Librarians are like priests. You can tell them you want information on just about any subject and they never look at you weird. It's like a rule or something. I figured even in a small town like this, my question wouldn't be the strangest one the librarian had heard. I didn't know if librarians had any sort of official privacy code, but I was counting on confidence. They're not big talkers. It comes from being forced to be quiet all the time.”

“I'm not afraid,” I said, reminding myself and also putting the house on notice just in case.“Well, that's a good thing,” a voice said.I screamed and whirled around.”

“Having someone you can talk to is cool, but it’s been my experience that it is a lot harder to find someone you can be quiet with.”

“Tell me the truth. When you were a kid, did you always color inside the lines?”"Coloring in the lines is the whole point. That’s why they have lines,” I said.“That’s where you’re wrong. The lines are there just to hold you in. Like a prison. Think what you might have created if there hadn’t been any lines.”

“Shit. I was stuck. I suspected Dick would skip the hassle of having to ferry me back and forth to talk to someone and instead convince my mom to toss me into a mental ward where I could stay out of his hair and he'd have her all to himself. I imagined myself wearing institutional pajamas and having to eat everything with a spoon because no one would trust me with a fork or knife. Most likely my roommate would be some freakish, giant-size woman who didn't speak because she'd chewed off her own tongue.”

“I refused to believe that I'd gone from sane to full-blown delusional in one night. After some consideration, I determined I didn't have any other crazy thoughts. I didn't think I was Napoleon, or that my bagel was an alien, and I didn't have voices in my head warning me about terrorist plots. Near as I could tell, I was still on the right side of sane.”