wHERE I’LL BE WAITING, EXCERPT

I met my monster the way most children do, in my dreams, the night of my seventeenth birthday, after the small garden dinner party and the late summer sun set and all the pink strawberry frosting from the vanilla cake had been eaten, he came to me, under a hot, dark sky pulsating with cumulus clouds and sticky air lit up by a full white moon; it was the first but not the last nightmare I’d have that summer.