Origin

The girl didn't look possessed.
I sat in a ring of teens on the porch, sitting in the dark around an old picnic table. We all were holding hands, and counting backward from one hundred in turns, going around the table. I said,"Two...."
"One," said the girl next to me.
She opened her eyes. Looking around at us, she said,"I am here."
Her voice had dropped an octave, gotten a gravelly, rough sound. Everyone gasped and stared at her. Someone said,"Who are you?"
"I am from the Underworld," she said. "You have summoned me. I come to take----Ow! Hey!"
I'd poked her arm with a pin that I'd slipped out of a small slot on my Swiss Army knife. She jumped back, and reverted to her actual voice.
"You telling me demons can be defeated with a pin?" I asked.
The other kids turned to me. "Come on, Lou!" one of them said. "Are you trying to ruin the seance?"
"This is why you wanted me here," I said, standing up. "You were doing a seance, and you asked me to come and see if it was real. And it's not. A pin startled her, made her talk in her real voice. There's no demon. You guys are just playing around."
"Great," said one of the other kids sarcastically. "Now get out, before you ruin the rest of the night."
I walked out and left, heading home. Back toward the farm I lived on.
You know how it goes. You're sixteen, an outcast, and nobody ever invites you to the good seances.

I stood by the table in Chemistry class, sorting garbage.
"Remember, when you're doing archaeology, you're looking through the things people threw out," said our student teacher, Miss Paula. "You're trying to learn about other cultures from what they left behind. So we're trying to figure out where in the building this stuff comes from."
"So if I find Atlantis," I said,"I dig and learn about them from their garbage."
Miss Paula smiled. "And why are you looking for Atlantis?"
"It's the only way I'll get into college."
"You could go to college if you applied yourself," said Esther, a girl I'd known since the fourth grade. "You're always out doing something crazy."
"Not always."
"When you were six, you organized your cousins into a group to look for ghosts. When you were eleven, you built a sea monster trap in your dad's pond. That summer you spent with your aunt in Lock Haven, you went looking for ghost towns."
"I mean, sometimes I pause to eat."
"Lou can do whatever he wants with his spare time," said Miss Paula. "Everyone get to work and figure out where these bags came from."
"So how was your seance?" my best friend Kline asked quietly as we worked.
"It sucked," I said. "No actual demons. Just some kids in the neighborhood, pretending."
"You really thought you'd find a demon?" he asked.
"Not really, but you never know. Make a great article for the school newspaper if I did."
"Does anyone have any thoughts on where their bags came from?" Miss Paula asked the class.
I put my hand up. "Mine is the English class."
"And what makes you think that?"
"I found bits of tobacco in the bottom."
"The English teacher doesn't smoke," said Esther.
"No, but the History teacher does," I said. "I've seen him. But he pretends he doesn't because he doesn't want us to know. So he never brings in a packet; he smuggles his cigarettes in a plastic bag. Which he never throws away in his own garbage---He uses the English teacher's wastebasket across the hall."
Miss Paula nodded. "He's right."
"Bam. Told you."
Kline asked,"You coming to play practice tonight?"
"I'll be there."

I was sitting at play practice on a warm January night.
The school musical was "Annie." My high school couldn't win at football, basketball, checkers, or anything else, but we had great school musicals. This was mainly because of the Director of Janitorial Services, a talented man who had been raised around the theater. So he knew how to direct, but never got the education to go higher than head janitor. He was the only person in the school system good enough to run the school plays, and he even hired the music teachers. The only person able to tell if a music teacher was qualified was the Director of Janitorial Services.
The Orphans were dancing onstage.
There were thirteen girls from the elementary school playing the Orphans in the play, and I'd been placed in charge of them. Backstage babysitter. At first it had been a grudging thing, but I'd been a little surprised to find myself growing attached to them. I'd gotten particularly close to the youngest, nine-year-old Misty Jo.
I gave her an encouraging smile, and she grinned at me. I walked up the stairs and into the high school's upstairs lobby. I stood by the huge window, looking north toward the stadium in the dark.
"What's wrong, buddy?"
Kline was behind me. I turned around. "I've just been feeling depressed, man."
"What's wrong?"
"Just a bunch of stuff. Mrs. Ellis didn't like my article on the marching band."
"Yeah, well, they suck."
"That's what I told her. She didn't like my writing style. She says I don't have what it takes to be a real writer."
"Well, she sucks, too."
"I just wish I could do something good, you know? I feel, like, worthless. Like I'm not good enough. That's why I want to discover something, you know? Something big, to make me feel like I matter. A ghost, a lost city, something like that." I turned and looked out the window. Rain was beginning to come down. "Something cool."

My bedroom was purple. My knife was red.
I sat on my bedroom floor, holding the knife against my wrist. I wanted to cut it. I wanted to die.
I closed my eyes, and prepared to press down. In the morning, they'd find me when I didn't show up for school.
I thought of Misty and the Orphans.
Damn it.
I wanted to cut my wrist. I didn't want to go on living. I thought of the smile she'd given me. The Orphans would miss me if I died.
Damn it.
I stood up and grabbed my green denim jacket. I walked out into the rain. I couldn't do it; I couldn't kill myself. Not when people would miss me. Maybe I could get hit by a car or something.
I lived in an area that might charitably be called "rural." I lived on a farm, surrounded mostly by other farms, punctuated by forests. I walked down the road, seeing nobody, walking in the rain.
I was maybe a mile from my house when I heard the scream.
It was coming from a house to my right, at the bottom of a huge hill. We'd ridden past there before and speculated that it was haunted. This could be an opportunity. I moved close to the house and looked in a window.
There were two people inside. Not haunted, after all. It was a man and a girl---She was dark-haired, a little younger than me maybe. He was drunk and hitting her. Not ghosts. Child abuse.
I retreated across the road and gathered up some decent-sized rocks. I began to throw them at the front door, making it bang loudly. Hit the door---BANG. Door---BANG. That one hit the car---BANG. Oh well. I kept heaving the rocks.
He burst out of the house with a rifle---It looked like a .22. He began firing into the woods near me. I ran deeper into the forest as he blazed away drunkenly.
He came across the road, and I circled back around toward the house. In the dark forest, with the rain, he didn't see me. I ran around to the back porch, trying the door.
It opened in to the kitchen. The girl was there. We stared at each other for a long moment.
"Who are you?" she said.
"I'm here to help you," I said. "My name is Lou."
"I'm Denise."
"Look, I just got here and stumbled on this, but it can't be much fun getting beat up by your dad. If I can get you out of here, do you have someplace you can stay?"
"With my mother," she said. "My parents are divorced. I have to stay weekends with my dad, because nobody really believes he gets drunk and hits me."
I nodded. "I'm going to see if I can prove that. I want you to call the cops. Now, it's the state cops in this area, so it's gonna take a while. I'll keep your dad busy. You stay safe."
"Hey. Why are you doing this for me?" Denise asked.
"Even I don't know," I said, and went back out into the rain.
The father was still by the road, on the outskirts of the forest, running around with his gun. He was facing away from me. I stopped by a birch tree and began ripping bark off of it.
Here's the thing about birch bark---It burns. Even in the rain, it burns. I peeled off a pretty good pile of it, and lit it on fire.
Then I shouted, and ran, ducking back into the forest. I didn't want to die any more---I'd forgotten about the suicide attempt earlier. I wanted to live, and help.
He turned and saw the fire. Panicking, he ran to stomp it out. I got across the road again, deep into the woods, where he couldn't see me. I was scratched and bleeding from the thorns and branches, soaking wet, my hair hanging in my eyes.
He fired into the forest, and then clumsily began reloading. I threw a fallen branch up into another tree branch, making a racket, and I moved. I'd seen Rambo enough times to know to change position. He looked up, startled, and kept reloading. Then he raised his gun and began blasting where I wasn't.
He was still shooting when the state police car arrived---Earlier than expected.
Drunk, dripping with rain, and holding a smoking gun, he turned to face the cops. They relieved him of the rifle and handcuffed him.
I'd retreated further into the woods, and I was watching from a distance.
I'd helped someone. I'd done it.

"You're gonna be fine," said Kline. I was sitting on the cafeteria table in what passed for our high school's backstage. He had his EMT bag sitting next to me, and was looking over my cuts and scrapes. "You could try not almost getting yourself killed. A little warning next time, okay? Dumbass."
"I saved somebody," I said.
"Yeah, you did. And you almost ended up dead in a ditch. You weren't even armed. I say again: Dumbass."
"Well, I might change that. I'm thinking about getting a whip for next time."
Kline looked at me. "Next time?"
I shrugged. "You remember I wanted to do something with my life? I think I just found it. I had an adventure, and I helped someone. If I can keep doing that....Maybe I don't have to kill myself, after all."
He looked at me. "I could teach you some first aid. Some karate."
"Yeah. I want that."
"How long you gonna do this for?" he asked. "I mean, it's not like you can just make adventures into a career."
"As long as I can," I said. "And see what I can discover. Something cool. Mostly...." I thought about it a moment. "Mostly, I think I'm gonna just be me."