Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks.” “What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows. “Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.

I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.

I remember Lena's expression when he knocked on the door; and how Alex had looked at her when she finally let him into the storeroom. I remember exactly what he was wearing, too, and the mess of his hair, the sneakers with their blue-tinged laces. His right shoe was untied. He didn't notice. He didn't notice anything but Lena.

That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.

Hope keeps you alive.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.