When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

2. Betrayal

“It’s true!” Willis said. “It is. Just go ask Mommy.”

And I would ask her. Of course I would. I’d ask her, and I knew exactly what she was going to say. Because he was older didn’t mean my brother was always right!

I rose from my place on the rug, letting a careless foot scatter the block tower Will had constructed so meticulously, and ran into the kitchen. “Mommy,” I cried. “Will says there’s no Santa Claus. He says there’s no reindeer, no sleigh, no Santa Claus. Just you and Daddy. That’s not true, is it? Is it?”