Nerve

we've learned an interesting rule about fame. Those who seem desperate for it are the people that others least want to see.

Why should I pay to watch when I can be paid to play?

I need to use my mind in a way that slows the out-of-control beating in my chest. The darkness around us could be anywhere, anytime. I could be alive or dead. Okay, I choose alive. While I’m at it, I choose the darkness to be a gentle blanket on a moonless night, where I rest a few feet from a boy who’s warm and sweet. When he holds me, his heart beats strong with what I tell myself is passion, not fear.

The calmness of dawn offers a daily promise that all things will shift back to normal

Why does Seattle have so many crows? Don’t birds like warm weather?

And I’ve got admirers. Okay, probably drunken geeks with nothing better to do than scroll through a thousand videos to check out cleavage shots in slow-mo, but still.

Sweet is highly overrated." So is responsible, loyal, and every other adjective you'd find scrawled in my yearbook.

I could have been killed, and their response is to film me?...In that moment, the myth that every time your picture is taken, a part of your soul is stolen strikes me as a certain truth, because I feel my spirit being sucked out of me, into hundreds of all-seeing lenses that simply want to capture my fear, my anger, my performance.

Hell, any game that gives its players guns is probably not the kind that'll ever really let you go free.