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 . . .

In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping. And in another: Alex

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Until, one day, she wasn’t.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.