I was tired of hanging on, taking the torn pieces to make something whole with them.

Maybe I'd just figured out there were some things you were better off not knowing

So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.

Rogerson," I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, "where would I find the pelagic zone?" "In the open sea," he said. "Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.

The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.

I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It's much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.