Josh will begin disappearing into a future where the only place he and I remain friends is on the Internet.

Normally when a person has a stellar image another person's waiting in the wings to tear them apart. They're waiting for that one fatal flaw to expose itself.

Whenever I'm out late she makes a sandwich for my school lunch. I always protest and tell her not to, saying I'll make my own when I get home. But she likes it. She says it reminds her of when I was younger and needed her.

Because no, I didn’t push her away. I didn’t add to her pain or do anything to hurt her. Instead, I left her alone in that room. The only person who might’ve been able to reach out and save her from herself. To pull her back from wherever she was heading. I did what she asked and I left. When I should have stayed.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

The young adult literature is relatively new - it just kind of exploded in the 2000s. When I grew up, there weren't bookstores with sections dedicated to teen lit, nor was my generation raised reading books written specifically for us. Because of that, today we still think of books for teens as children's books and so when you write a book that includes sensitive topics, it just seems even more controversial. What's troubling to me about that is these are issues adults know that teens deal with. Not writing about them makes them something we don't, or can't talk about.

And as I stood there in the hallway―alone―trying to understand what had just happened and why, I realized the truth: I wasn't worth an explanation―not even a reaction. Not in your eyes.