The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while Foster the People plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work.

a life is measured by moments like these

Sean reaches between us and slides a thin bracelet of red ribbons over my free hand. Lifting my arm, he presses his lips against the inside of my wrist. I'm utterly still; I feel my pulse tap several times against his lips, and then he releases my hand. "For luck," he says. He takes Dove's lead from me. "Sean," I say, and he turns. I take his chin and kiss his lips, hard. I'm reminded, all of a sudden, of that first day on the beach, when I pulled his head from the water. "For luck," I say to his startled face.

Sharing revelations is easier when it doesn't matter.

I felt a tickle on my skin; it took me a moment to realize that Cole was driving his die-cast Mustang up my arm. He was laughing to himself, hushed and infectious, as if there was still any reason to be quite.

It seemed like the best weapons in my life had always been the most innocuous: empty plastic bins, a blank CD, an unmarked syringe, my smile in a dark room.

I knew he wouldn't come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images of him to me of what he looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf on the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn't know how to begin to look.