Are you okay?" I (Cassie) call up to him. "Um. Define okay." (Ben) "Okay means you're not bleeding to death." "I'm okay.

I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I'm afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?

Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.

Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected

Oh, Will Henry. After all we have been through, how could I send you away now, at our most critical hour? You are indispensable to me.

You can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it