Every choice is limited. That's life.

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

I love you. They can't take it away.

They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.

Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyes wide. Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .