Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red weld is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.

The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me.

Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.