Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, where love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn’t matter much measured up against...

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been–Dicey guessed she’d never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well,...

She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.

Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they’d had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the...

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

It wasn’t the worst time when Melody left me,” the Professor said. “The worst time was the years before. Because I didn’t know I couldn’t hate anybody that much; it was like she’d stuck a...