New Release Sample: CONFESSIONS OF A LOST KID

Outings with Mrs. S were special occasions. We all loved her, even if she did rule with an iron fist and no one could ever get away with anything. The important thing was that we knew she loved us, fiercely, like a lioness. No one ever made fun of her children or pushed us to the back of the line. No one pried into our lives and put us under a microscope, and then when they decided we weren’t useful, relegated us to the trash, the way the Grandstones did.

The Grandstones were Neighborlee's resident robber barons and spoiled rich kids, with the attitude that they were entitled to everything and anyone they wanted. If they had to rewrite history to prove it, they would.

Mrs. S took me to lunch at Miller's Diner, where I had my first ever peanut butter chocolate malt. I knew Stephanie Groves, the waitress who took care of us. She was an NCH graduate who came in once a month to do crafts or bake with the children, or just play games with us. Many of the Lost Kids came back to NCH and repaid the debt of love and care they had been given.

After lunch, we went to Divine's Emporium and I met Miss Angela. Divine's is an old Victorian house, one of the oldest in town, painted olive and gold, with all the fancy gingerbread trimming and gables and skinny windows and a deep porch and a flagstone walk and a wrought iron fence across the front. It sits on the edge of a somewhat steep hill, at the end of a dead-end street, looking down over the Metroparks. The hill isn't too steep that deer can't come up the slope to Angela's garden in back. They don't pillage her garden like they do other gardens in town, and she puts out salt licks and bins of grain and fruit for them. All the animals that come to visit behave themselves in Angela's garden.

That's the outside. The inside…is a wonderland. Lots of rooms that, from the outside, should be small, yet feel huge on the inside, filled with a wonderful hodge-podge of treasures. Lots of secondhand items, with Divine's doing a booming resale business. A glorious mixture of pottery and crystal, rag dolls, candles, used books, wind chimes, old furniture, nostalgia toys, a tiny soda fountain/coffee shop tucked into a corner, jewelry, vintage clothes, apothecary jars full of penny candy, and the Wishing Ball.

The Wishing Ball, that day I first saw it, sat on the marble countertop in the main room of the shop, next to an old-fashioned brass cash register. It was about the size of a bowling ball, something along the lines of those gazing balls that some people put in their gardens, but dark, with metallic rainbow streaks all through it. The colors seemed to move. Not when I was looking straight at them, but as I turned my head, or from the corner of my eyes. The stand was a coiled, dark brass dragon, the long tail wrapped around twice.