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I’m right to be here, I tell myself. It’s too late for doubts. Like I said, Revenge is for the mighty.

I whistle the attack signal as loud as I can.

Gillis and Tillman charge from the woods, and I dart out from behind the truck, firing one ball after another, splattering the fat boy and the robot, the front of the house, and the porch steps. Globs of orange paint blossom everywhere, like mutant peaches. We’re all laughing, but at the same time, ready to run into the sanctuary of the woods if Captain Crazy tries to chase us.

Then the lights in his house flick on.

Expecting the door to fly open, I half turn toward the tree line, but nothing happens. Inside the house, a dog barks like wild, but everything else is as still as a tombstone. None of us fire another shot. Something’s up. We can feel it—some kind of Captain Crazy weirdness.

Suddenly a voice rises up over the dog’s bark, a long, ripping cry, so loud and metallic it must have come through a bullhorn. “Yaaaahhhhhhh!”

“Holy crap,” says Gillis.

Then the bullhorn voice goes, “Stop in the name of the
nine prophets of the Yimmies. You are surrounded by titanium angels. There is no escape.”

I look at the silhouettes of Gillis and Tillman.

“I’m gone,” says Tillman, and just that fast his silhouette tears for the trees.

“I’m behind you,” says Gillis, and there he goes too.

Me, I’m not backing down so easy. Besides, I haven’t achieved my main goal yet—to smack a big orange splotch dead in the middle of the front door. I raise my rifle to take aim when the bullhorn screeches again.

“Search yourself for your inner heaven or end up stuck in limbo!”

This is weird. Now the voice is coming from a new place, somewhere near the fat boy, just behind it, maybe. I can’t figure out how he could have got there so quick.

I fire my last shot, but I don’t know whether I hit the door because I’m too startled by that weird voice crying out again, a long wail like something dead and come back, and this time it sounds even closer. Fast as I can, I sprint to the lime-green truck and crouch by one of the tires. Footsteps crunch in the gravel close by, and the dog’s bark starts up again, only he’s not in the house anymore. I can’t tell exactly where he is, maybe behind me. Maybe the captain is closing in from one side and his dog’s coming from the other. They’re tricky, but I’m trickier. I slide under the truck, where nobody can see me from either side.

For a long time, the place is quiet. Then I hear the soft trot of the dog’s feet, probably about ten yards away. He circles the truck once and stops. I know he’s sure to smell me, but I don’t know which side of the truck I should scramble out from without running into the captain.

The dog begins to growl, the kind of low growl that starts
way back in the throat and gets louder as it rumbles forward. The next thing I know, he’s at the side of the truck, his muzzle thrusting in next to one of the tires, the growls busting into full barks. He paws at the dirt and snaps in my direction. From what I can tell, he’s not too big to crawl right under here with me and have my face for dinner.

There’s nothing to do except explode out from the other side of the truck and make a run for the trees, hoping the captain won’t see me. The dog squeezes his head and shoulders under the truck as I roll out the other side. I hop up and run, dodge around the winged giraffe, and smack hard into Captain Crazy’s chest.

He grips the bullhorn in one hand and, with the other, he grabs hold of my arm. I’ve never stared into his eyes this close before. It’s like five hundred years of the world’s insanity staring back at me.

“Let go of me,” I demand, trying to wrench my arm away.

His grip only squeezes tighter, and he sticks his face so close to mine I can smell the unexpected scent of his breath—Cocoa Puffs.

Looking hard through my paintball goggles and into my eyes, he goes, “You are not who you think you are.”

That’s all: “You are not who you think you are.”

Then he smiles.

He lets go of my arm, and for a moment I just stand there staring at him like I’m hypnotized. Then my brain kicks into gear, and I take off across the yard and into the woods, dodging around trees, jumping over shrubs, never looking back. The dog’s barks are far behind me. No one can catch me now.

But all the way to the car those words keep banging around in my head.
You are not who you think you are, you are not who you think you are, you are not who you think you are
.

Gillis and Tillman are lucky they had the sense to wait for me with the car. They’d have a lot to answer for if they left me stranded in the forest of craziness. Driving home, we laugh and replay the invasion, and talk about how much scrubbing the captain will have to do tomorrow. We don’t worry about him calling the police. They aren’t likely to pay attention to him if he does. Still, even when I get home, I can’t help but think about how he looked at me and what he said.
You are not who you think you are
.

How does he know who I am? He doesn’t even know who he is.

The thing is, growing up, I was always one hundred percent sure of who I was—Bobby McDermott’s little sister. That was a great thing to be. It didn’t matter that he was six years older. We were tight. He was the one who started calling me Ceejay way back when I was only two years old. He knew Catherine Jameson was no name for a warrior girl. The two of us just laughed at how corny and goofy our parents were, but we had each other, so it was fun. It was like we were both changelings, brought up in the wrong family together.

You should see my mom. She’s so bubbly, it’s like her cork could pop any second. And she’s always that way—upbeat and perky as the “Happy Birthday” song. I don’t understand it. How great can life be when you’re a bookkeeper at a body shop? The biggest things that ever happen to her are church and a trip to
the hairdresser. But even when Bobby had to go into the army, she acted like it would be great for him, like God was dripping golden blessings on us instead of dumping a truckload of crap on our heads.

Now her mom, Grandma Brinker, is sick—cancer—but Mom swears it’s not serious. That’s right—cancer. Not serious. Weekends, she’s been making the hour-and-a-half drive to Davenport to help Grandma take care of her house, and every time she comes back, she’s all positive and glowing. “They got it in time,” she says. “Just a few more treatments and she’ll be back to her old self. We’ll all go over for a visit then.” That’s Mom. She can even find the silver lining in cancer.

My dad’s not much different. He’s just the male version, grinning like
hearty
is his middle name, slapping people on the back, calling them
bud
, shaking hands with his hand-of-steel death grip. And the jokes. If he ever comes up to you and says, “Have you heard the one about …,” run the other way as fast as you can. They’re the lamest. To hear my uncles’ stories, Dad used to be a pretty big badass himself back in the day, but now he’s just a jolly, fat tire-plant foreman who gets all sentimental over hokey songs and Christmas movies.

My big sister’s a replica of Mom. In fact, since she’s eight years older than me, she seems more like an aunt than a sister. My little sister’s a stuck-up priss, and my little brother’s a captain second grade in Halo, so I’ve barely seen him since he got the Xbox. I don’t even know how we ended up with so many kids in our family. Can you imagine my parents having sex?
Errrrrg
. All I can figure is that every once in a while, during sleep, my dad accidentally rolls over on my mom, and presto, nine months later, there’s a new baby squalling around the house. It’s ridiculous. Why would you want to bring a bunch of
kids into this messed-up world? I mean, wake up! Bobby’s in the war, for God’s sake. He’s in the frigging war! And it’s all my parents’ fault.

Some of the idiots at school say they could see trouble coming for Bobby a mile away, but that’s just because they don’t know the difference between
bad
and
BADD
. The first one is small and mean. The second one is vast, like a wild continent. That’s Bobby. Sure, he did crazy things, but he never hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. Well, except maybe himself.

When he was ten, he rode his bicycle off a park-pavilion roof and broke his arm. We still have the pictures of him with his arm in that cast, a big smile on his face like he’s showing off the Congressional Medal of Honor. In junior high, he jumped out of a second-story window at school, just sailed out like Superman because someone told him he couldn’t. He held the record for climbing the highest on one of those high-voltage towers in the alfalfa field off Highway 9, and once, on his motorcycle, he held a wheelie the entire length of Marshall Drive, around the curves and through the intersections. He was wild but always in a fun way.

Then, when he was just out of high school, he went a little too far. He stole a car, not to keep for himself or to profit from in any way, but just to cruise in, to be a free man in at four o’clock in the morning while his motorcycle was in the shop. No doubt he would’ve brought it back, too, parked it just where he found it, but this time his famous luck let him down.

The cops spotted him speeding down Gunderson Road on the outside of town and took after him with red lights flashing. Of course, Bobby being Bobby, he gunned it and would’ve lost them, too, if it hadn’t been for that sharp curve and the bald tires on that stolen Ford. Instead, the rear end got away from
him, and he ended up plowing through a fence and straight into the water hazard on the seventh hole of Knowles’ shaggy little nine-hole golf course.

He didn’t even try to run anymore—he just stood there in the knee-deep water with his hands over his head, ready to surrender. Still, Officer Dave and Officer Larry made him lie facedown in the rough and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. “Your joy-riding days are over, Bobby,” they told him. And then they found that baggie of weed in his pocket.

Things get a little murky from there. I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about how the law and the government and all that work, but the deal they gave Bobby had a real bad smell about it. The lawyers and the judge, the cops, and the guy whose car Bobby stole got together with my parents and chiseled out this deal that allowed for a choice between jail and joining the army.

I’m not going to lie and say Bobby hadn’t become pretty well acquainted with the police in our town over the years, but he never got in any serious-serious trouble. Wouldn’t you think they’d just give him probation? Of course, I didn’t want to see him go to jail, but sending an eighteen-year-old just out of high school into a war for having a little bit too much fun doesn’t seem nearly fair. In fact, I have to wonder if it’s even legal.

That’s what happened, though. My parents didn’t even fight for him—just the opposite. Talk about cowardly. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive them for that. They even tried to act like the army was going to be the greatest thing in the world for Bobby. Sure, the military would straighten him right out. First time he came home in uniform, my dad was so proud, you’d have thought Bobby was a five-star general. Of course, the war had only just got started then. Dad told me they wouldn’t need that many soldiers over there. Bobby probably
wouldn’t even have to leave the States. There would just be one big raid.
Bam!
Saddam would go down and that would be it. Mission accomplished.

But it didn’t happen that way. More and more soldiers had to go. And they didn’t come back like they were supposed to. The president kept sending them in again and again and again. And every time, I got madder and madder at my parents and at this whole stupid town with its so-called upright citizens—the lawyers and the judge—who took Bobby away and stranded me here, the only real human being left in this Martian town.

But now I’ve got a plan. When Bobby gets back, we’ll move in together, maybe get one of those rent houses on the south side of town. He’ll get a job and I’ll finish high school. Then I’ll get a job too, and we’ll save our money until we have enough to shake this town right off our backs.

I haven’t told Bobby the plan yet, and all this waiting is wearing on my nerves. Wishing and hoping for too long can take a heavy toll. So, a couple days after the battle of Casa Crazy, when I get a glimpse of someone who looks a whole lot like Bobby, I have to wonder if I can trust my own eyes.

I’m at Corker Park with Brianna, sitting on a picnic table eating a snow cone, and on the street just to the east, Sophie Lowell rolls by in her red Toyota—Sophie’s sister Mona and Bobby were real hot and heavy before he went into the army—and I swear, someone who looks just like him is riding in Sophie’s passenger seat, wearing a red baseball cap and tipping a beer. I try to get Brianna to load up in her car and chase them, but she just tells me I’m imagining things.

“But it looked just like him,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, “you just want him back so bad, you think it looks like him.”

Maybe she’s right. Later, I tell my parents about it, and they laugh and say there’s no way Bobby can be back yet. The army
does things on a tight schedule, my dad says. My mom pats my cheek and tells me to be patient. “Besides,” she says, “he would’ve called if he was coming home early.”

They both grin ridiculously at me like I’m just their foolish girl and there’s nothing easier than being patient about Bobby still being stuck out there in the bomb-infested world. But they must be right. It’s probably just wishful thinking. If Bobby was back, he’d come straight to me before anything else. Still, I can’t quit replaying, over and over, the memory of that car driving by. And each time I picture it, the passenger looks more like Bobby.

Saturday night, Tillman’s sister Dani is having a party at her place, and the word is Sophie Lowell is supposed to be there. Nothing good ever happens at Dani’s, but Tillman, Gillis, and Brianna are hot to party, and me, I don’t care if people think I’m crazy—I’m determined to have a talk with Sophie about who she’s been driving around with lately.

Besides, I have to admit it—I have a thing for Tillman Grant. I never told anybody but my girl Brianna, and she said I should let it go. But what can you do? Your heart’s like a little kid. You can tell it to keep its hands to itself, but still it keeps reaching out for what it wants. That’s how it is with Tillman—my heart won’t stop reaching for him. It drives me crazy, those parts of myself I can’t control.