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his shoulder and smiled. “Yeah?”
    “What do you know about closet monsters?”
    “Not a thing, my darling. But the world is full of strangeness for anyone who cares to look.”
    * * *
    Over a second and third cup of Christmas-flavored sweat socks, Andrew led me through a series of guided meditations. He taught me first to flush out the unwanted collection of borrowed emotions I’d been picking up all over town.
    “Every night before you go to bed,” he said, “remind yourself as you’re meditating that these emotions are not your crap. They don’t belong to you, and you don’t have to own them.”
    I had to admit I felt better than I had in a very long time. The tea had worked well, but the meditation felt like I’d opened all the doors and windows in a musty house. The cool breeze blowing through my mind made everything fresh, and my own thoughts were no longer dulled. I was ready to run outside and jog to my car.
    Andrew stopped me before I could throw the door open and stare back at my old enemy, the sun.
    “If you go out there right now it would be like sunbathing naked on the equator. All you’ve done so far is clear out all the crap that’s been cluttering up your head for ages. In a way, it was keeping things out. You can only cram so much into a full box. But now the space is empty, so you’re more vulnerable than before. You need to shield yourself like I do. Think of it as psychic sunscreen.”
    Andrew spent the next hour teaching me to build an enclosure around myself. We’d started with bricks, but my visualization abilities were too vivid, and I fought. “I can’t see anything around me,” I said. “And how can I breathe in this tiny room?”
    We changed tactics. My imagination formed a rock-hard wall of crystal encircling me, forming a bubble. Because I could see through it, I didn’t feel like it was closing in.
    I felt invincible.
    Invincible, but not without some niggling worries. What if I couldn’t sustain my wall? Did I have to think about it all the time to keep it going? How would I know if the protection wasn’t working?
    What if everything Andrew was saying was a wheelbarrow full of manure from a flying circus elephant?
    His explanation for my problems felt right, though. The changes in me felt true, deep in my gut, and not a result of suggestion or positive thinking. So much of the strangeness in my life fell into place.
    “Practice, Zoey,” Andrew said. “Don’t walk out the door in the morning until you put your wall up. Believe it’ll stay put. And fortify it from time to time—take a moment to think about it, feel for flaws, smooth them out. Maintenance will be second nature eventually.” He pressed a plastic bag of herbs in my hand as I gathered my things to go. “Just in case,” he said. “Some days might be hard. I have a feeling you’ve got shit coming your way.”
    More good news.
    He stood with Milo in his arms, looking worried. Milo made a mewling squeak. I gave the fox’s gigantic ears a rub and hugged them both. “Stop worrying, guys. I’ll be fine. I’ll be by in a few days. With closet-monster baked goods, if he’s still around. Thank you.”
    I left the store a little apprehensive, but feeling like a brand-new Zoey. I’d been inside long enough that traffic from the accident had cleared, the sun had burned through the haze in the sky, and high tide had rolled in, washing the air clean. I yanked my yellow beret over my hair and had to hold myself back from skipping to my car.
    * * *
    The commute from Sausalito to the small beach town of Bolinas gave me time to calm my euphoria to a more natural level. I found myself inspecting my newly constructed, imaginary bubble for cracks and soft spots. I reinforced it wherever I felt the need, feeling both giddy with new knowledge and silly for believing in it.
    My cheerful outlook wavered when Maurice met me at the front door. The look of him was still startling, even with foreknowledge. He’d changed to