Imagination up in flames!

The day of the fire, history, herstory, THEIRstory, OURstory, was gone in under an hour. Gone because the Catholic Committee to Expel Magic went a little overboard this time. It was too much gasoline to burn a single copy of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone, even if the first edition is 309 pages.

The Committee got rid of magic all right. There is not a free word, a spark of a dream, left in town. There are only ashes, and these, lighter than the ash left from burning anthracite. Your boots don't even crunch when you walk over what had been the stacks. It's dust. From dreams to dust, as the saying goes.

"Yes," I said, "I'd like to read to you."

"Thank God," Tori answered. "Because I'm tired of fruit baskets. I'm sick to death of shoe-fly pies and cobblers. If one more person asks me what it's like to be this way, I'll jump off Lover's Lane bluff and join The Ghost. I swear I will."

Ghost. What a bunch of hooey. Ghost. I went up there when I was a girl. I went up there with a boy to see whether the story our parents - mine and Victoria's - told us was true or a scare tactic.

I let him kiss me. I kissed him. Tongue to tongue like, and not a darn thing happened. Ghost my tush. Yep, not a darn thing happened for eight months and three weeks. It was enough to make me wish I had been the scary sort of creature, or at least the kind who listened to parental edicts.

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