I'd ridden to school with Link every day since kindergarten, when we became best friends after he gave me half his Twinkie on the bus. I only found out later it had fallen on the floor.

She didn't say a work, and I gave up trying, because you couldn't hear either one of us over the shattering noise of hearts breaking and the looming shadow of the last word, the one we refused to say.

He could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped - the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no long hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rock tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.

I smiled at her, but she was already lost in thought, looking around the library as if it held all the answers to all our problems.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper. She lived.

You can't jump off a cliff when you have already fallen off a bigger one.

I am a friend. I have in my possession two thousand assorted buttons, eight hundred keys, and only one friend. Perhaps it is not something you can understand. I have not often been one before. I will be now.