The Truth According to Us

by Annie Barrows

and we all laughed, but I wondered. I wondered if something had happened to Sam to make him the way he was or if he had grown that way without noticing. If a person could grow to be like Sam without noticing, there was a chance that I was just as strange and hadn’t noticed it. What was I like? I wondered. Did most girls my age feel the way I did, as if the people I thought I knew had turned out to have a thousand little tunnels leading away from the face they showed the world? Was this something everyone else had already grasped? The buried parts, now, they were fascinating but ominous, too. And I thought, Maybe that’s why Sam Spurling decided to live with a million cats. Maybe a million cats were easier to understand than one or two people.