Out of Darkness

the dead are not always right. The dead are not saints. But the dead are ours. We carry them with us like it’s our job. And maybe it is.

In the shade, the air smelled of true autumn.

There are so many funerals that the pews in churches have no time to cool.

He wrote until the story was there, outside him, terrible in its truth.

carrying a name was a way of caring for those who’d given

To touch her braid was to remember her mother. The code was simple: when her mother had a braid, she belonged to Naomi.

They had been happy, for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.

The half-truth was that she had homework. The whole truth was hidden in some inner pocket of her heart.

She was the only pretty thing that every boy among us believed could be his, at least ten minutes at a time.

So Naomi put the gun in the same category that held Henry’s Bible: things he owned but didn’t use anymore.

It wasn’t just that Muff had a radio and better cooking gear; the house had the warmth of a place where people were happy together and would go on being happy.

Even the back of Cari’s neck looked mad.

She knew how fast charm could turn cruel. She knew that men could take and take and leave the people who loved them wrecked or dead.

He couldn’t simper around these fools and still be what he was becoming for Naomi. If he had to burn bridges to be that man, he would.

All kinds of forgetting were possible in the tree. Naomi could forget the grime she scrubbed from the sinks, the slap of wet sheets against her ankles as she flung them over the clothesline, the breakfasts and lunches and dinners waiting to be made and eaten and cleaned up. She could forget the stares at school and Miranda’s icy words. Inside the tree, she could forget the girl she saw Wash with at his house and the ones at Mason’s. She could forget that Wash belonged to the twins first of all.

Beto and Cari sat in the booth leg to leg. They pressed wordless messages into each other’s hands under the table.

that he’d gone all the way with her out back of the cafeteria. We didn’t believe him, but we liked