So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend.

Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete-like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.

The way I see it," she continued, "is that some things are just meant to be the way they are.

I always wrote about girls that went to the beach and had that summer that changed everything. So I was interested in what it would be like to live in a tourist town where everyone has these life changing experiences, but your whole life is there.

I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell.