Guest Post - Character Post from author J.H. Walker

Today, I'm happy to welcome author J.H. Walker to Bibliognome.  Here she presents a post from one of her character's point of view.

Lex speaks:

I love this photo of A.J.'s house. It was taken the fall we turned eight,
the year A.J. and I found Ipod in the ditch in the alley. He'd been beaten
up pretty bad. We hauled him home in the wagon and something amazing
happened that bonded the three of us forever. The eeriness of the photo
captures the strangeness of it all. But what I like most about this photo is
something you can't see-our house. It sits behind A.J.'s house and it's
hidden in the trees. Hidden is an important word for us. I like looking at
this photo and knowing we're there, but no one can see us.

Imagine a sleek, two-room cabin with polished wood planks, worked metal, and
stained glass windows. Then set it high in the branches of a massive oak.
Add electricity, heat, a tiny working kitchen, and four bunks in the
bunkroom-the coolest tree house you've ever seen. It was tight for the three
of us, but we made it work.

Yeah, sure, right, you say. Three unrelated teenagers, one of them a guy,
living in a tree house. Where are the parents? It's not as if we didn't have
them. Well, Ipod and A.J. had fathers, if you could in any remote way
classify Ipod's dad as a father, the S.O.B. I had both, but my dad was of
the absentee kind. As for my mom, let's just say, she was way too busy being
focused on herself. The only parental figure in the group that really cared
about us was Sam, A.J.'s dad. The deal with Sam was that he was slowly
fading away from a broken heart, so he didn't notice much. You couldn't
blame him. A.J.'s mother's suicide was hard on all of us. You have to know
the whole story to understand.

Sometimes you don't get handed the perfect family. Sometimes you have to
make your own. I'm not saying it was easy. The living situation, while not
perfect, worked for us. We had what we needed and Sam being there gave us
legitimacy. We used the big house too and no one really knew that Ipod was
staying there full time. We'd grown up together and Ipod was pretty geeky
and not seen as threatening. The whole thing happened gradually and flew
beneath the radar.

We were all about flying beneath the radar, trying to keep A.J.'s secret on
the down low. Knowing you could disappear at any moment was stressful. She
had no control of it and her biggest fear was that it would happen at
school. She kept a low profile, thinking that if she was just a non-entity,
if it happened, maybe no one would even notice she was gone. The flaw in
that plan was that before she disappears, there's about a minute of
shimmering and fading. That's something people notice. I mean, the second
she started to shimmer, all phones would be pointed her way. Can you say
YouTube sensation? Can you say life, as we know it, is over?

So that's what we were coping with.so far so good. Our junior year went by
pretty much like all the rest. A.J. was still getting yanked into the past
every few months. She'd stay for a few hours or even a couple of days and
then return. No big. Ipod and I covered for her and there were no exposures.
We made it to spring, figuring we had about a month more of junior year,
then only senior year to get through. Then something happened that changed
everything.

Because he moved to town.