A lot of kids grow up early – old people would know this if they paid attention or remembered – and girls mature sooner than boys. But Valerie was exceptional; she was born old.

Her infancy was observant and her toddlerhood was deliberate. She used to unnerve Sandy, the way she would gaze at her and Wayne when they smoked and talked or drank and talked: little baby in a Johnny Jump-Up, slowly twirling on a toe and staring at her parents, instead of bouncing with glee like a normal child.

Valerie didn’t stand until she’d already figured how to get back down. She didn’t take her first steps until she’d mentally mapped out a run. She wouldn’t talk until she could converse in paragraphs.

When she reached the age of articulated magic, when other five- and six-year-olds were describing imaginary friends and comparing ideas about how each of them would use three wishes, Valerie began to sense death. Of course she didn’t recognize her ability at the time, and didn’t name it until she read her first vampire novel at twelve, but she could sense the imminence of soul-departure or, as she later came to call it, the inexorable dissipation of spirit.

The initial, incomplete event, on which she cut her psychic teeth, took place in the local hospital right before her tonsillectomy. She was five and totally unprepared for the operation; neither her parents nor the doctor had seen fit to explain surgical procedures to such a little kid. After prepping her with a rectal temperature reading (!) and a few perfunctory injections (ouch), and before laying her out on a sheeted table and covering her face with the ether-soaked, color-screaming metal cage, between those two hideous events, some nurse parked the little girl in a wheelchair in a corridor, placed her own chart in her lap, and told her to watch the man on the gurney across the hall.

That was undoubtedly a keep-the-child-busy strategy, but Valerie took it seriously. She focused on the immobile man, assuming that the papers on her lap concerned him. It seemed to her that there was a vague cloud around the edges of him, hinting of purplish-gray and more apparent near his chest and face than anywhere else. It was a sight better detected from the corners of her eyes than from the fronts, and it seemed to be dissolving away from the man, like smoke, while she watched.

Two people came then, dressed all in white, and they began to push the man on the gurney away from Valerie, down the corridor. She couldn’t get out of her wheelchair, but she objected vigorously. They ignored her and kept pushing. They hardly noticed that she was upset – it was a hospital after all, and she was a patient – and they never dreamed that her complaints were attempts to warn them that the man on the gurney needed help.

Another nurse appeared, and she spun Valerie’s chair around into the tonsillectomy chamber. While a crew of grownups restrained and anaesthetized the struggling child, the man on the gurney coded and died down the hall.

Two years after that, when she was seven and a half, they found the hurt bird. Valerie was in the back yard trying not to hear her parents argue and she noticed fluttery panicked movement in the leaves under the big oak. She investigated, moving away from her father’s hot complaints and her mother’s cold reasoning. It was an immature robin, cat-mauled but alive, and Valerie’s attentive posture distracted her parents from their vehemence. They came to her and put their hands on her shoulders, but neither Wayne’s optimism nor Sandy’s practical attitude got through to her. She gazed at the bird and tried to make out the pale blue-gray edge that flickered around it. She helped her parents bed the animal in a rag-lined shoebox, but she was neither upset nor surprised that it died.

Death and other manifestations of life come seldom to the suburbs; it was another three years before Valerie had occasion to experience her strange sense. Three years of school and car-pooled enrichment outside the house, and eddies of parental tension within. Valerie didn’t enjoy those elementary times. She knew she was supposed to be carefree and happy but she didn’t feel that way, and as she looked around at her classmates and playmates, she concluded that many children were not enjoying childhood the way the adults thought they did. The more athletic ones had a better time than sedentary kids like Valerie. The fuckups got more attention than the well-behaved. But what Valerie and the other kids hated most was the impotence. They abhorred the directives about what to eat, when to sleep, and whom to respect. It was nearly as oppressive as being told how to breathe. And those discomforts were exacerbated by the strictures of safety: the cul-de-sacs (dead-ends!), the sidewalks, the escorts.