A 15-year-old who believes the world has too long misunderstood and mistreated him, conspires to become his parents’ therapist to prove what he’s truly capable of.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1:

First of all, you’re not going to fully understand Cam Hanson unless you forget what the police have said and pretty much everything that you’ve heard on the news.

CLARIFICATION #1: Cam Hanson has not run away from home.

Okay, technically, he has, but really the more sophisticated and professional explanation is that Cam Hanson has taken a brief sabbatical from home. More specifically, a brief sabbatical from his role as hands-on, day-to-day leader of his family and his parents’ only hope at healing their deep-seated psychic wounds.

(Hey, nice resume for someone not even sixteen.)

CLARIFICATION #2:  The temporary suspension of familial duties and subsequent departure to an undisclosed location to write what you’re reading now, this chronicle of what really happened to the Hansons in those ten months after he turned fifteen, is not Cam’s doing by choice, but rather his best option out of several less attractive due to the unfortunate and inexcusable actions and belief systems of certain nefarious individuals, all of which (and all of whom) will be exposed, and rightfully so, in said chronicle.

Okay, now that everybody understands each other, let’s go ahead and start where it all started for Cam Hanson. Watertown, Wisconsin, February 18, 1989, three nights after his golden birthday and about two hours before he received a vision from the future.

Cam sat in the back of the family Olds idling just out of sight of their new old house on 908 Clyman Street. The dashboard buzz-rattled, the vents exhaled stale warm air, but watching his parents observe an invisible wall between them annoyed him more than anything. Cam knew the tension wasn’t physical. He figured it was the privacy of their own minds buzz-rattling with all the ramifications for all the possible ways the evening could play out.

At his side his younger and still dutiful brother Mike squirmed in the hot disquiet their parents had cooking. Cam hated to see that almost as much as he hated that Dad couldn’t seem to make up his mind, and Mom, mind made up, wouldn’t dream of speaking hers. Even harder, something—gut instinct, maybe a voice—had been telling him lately not to get directly involved. Not yet. He squeezed Mike’s arm in a hang-in-there-kid kind of way for the both of them.

“Obviously do what you think is right, Don, but if you say it maybe should you say it before dinner?” Mom poked the first brick out of that wall, but her voice was so indirect if the vents hadn’t blown it into the backseat Cam would have missed it. “Is waiting too long a bad idea? Could be, I don’t know.”

He saw his father in the rear-view mirror register this the way he always did when he was troubled: skin crinkling in the corners of his brown glazy eyes, lips pressing so tightly together instead of a mouth he had only a trim strip of graying mustache that matched his graying hair.

Cam had been seeing a lot more mustache than mouth since Dad’s return from a weekend in Florida, burying his grandparents and learning he’d inherited their secret, second home at 908 Clyman Street. The second greatest thing that had happened to Cam Hanson so far. The first greatest thing? The grand old house came already furnished with a family.

“It’s your decision, and however you want to say it, if you say it. ‘Sorry Gundys, but as you’re aware it’s our house now, so…’ and so on, something like that?”

Dad winced his mouth back into view. “And so on?”

“Sooner than later is probably better, but whatever you decide I’m sure will be fine too.”

Jesus-C, Cam couldn’t believe all the restraint on display.

He’d forgotten his parents capable. Right before last summer, when Cam had his situation, it wasn’t like they just overreacted, they basically brought shotguns to an effing pillow fight. Of course they tried to make it seem like ever since he’d returned home they were retracing their steps back to normal. But what passed for normal anymore made him pretty suspicious.