There's Someone Inside Your House

I guess you never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head.

He couldn’t be dead, because he was still so alive in her mind.

It was sad that people only got along when everybody was unhappy.

People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface.

They didn’t talk much, but their silence was companionable.

It had been so long since Makani had felt any amount of genuine, unadulterated happiness that she’d forgotten that sometimes it could hurt as much as sadness. His declaration pierced through the muscle of her heart like a skillfully thrown knife. It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.

They thought puzzle were boring. But I’ve always thought they were satisfying, you know? Each piece having its exact place.

Everybody has at least one moment they deeply regret, but that one moment...it doesn't define all of you.

His declaration pierced through the muscle of her heart like a skillfully thrown knife. It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.

Makani peered over her grandmother’s shoulder and out the large window that looked across their front lawn. She scanned the yards for the boogeyman, the Babadook, Ted Bundy. The street was empty.

It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.

Only Darby, who also innately understood the concept of otherness had successfully avoided this pitfall. just as it was rude and invasive to ask him about his genitalia or sexual preference, it was equally rude and invasive to ask her about her ethnicity. It was the sort of information that should be volunteered. Never asked for.

Someday, their story would be a chapter in one of those sleazy, mass-market, true-crime paperbacks that were shelved in the cobwebbed corners of used bookstores—the types of paperbacks that boasted about the number of crime-scene photographs inside.

Running away from home didn’t change the fact that a person still had to live with themselves.

They crossed the railroad tracks and went over the river. The countryside was flat. Stiff vegetation, muddy fields, round bales of hay. Modest farmhouses and monstrous tractors. The view was uniform in every direction, broken only by the long, dinosaurian contraptions that Makani had learned were center-pivot irrigation systems.

Osborne smelled like diesel, tasted like despair, and was surrounded by an ocean of corn. Stupid corn. So much corn.

Well, I know that our regrets change us, and that's how we grow--for either better or worse. And it seems to me, you're growing better.

I don't know. I'd like to think I'm a better person now, but for the rest of my life, I'll always have this question in my mind. I'll always have doubt. Something could trigger me, and I might snap or freak out again.

Makani genuinely hoped that others . . . found peace and strength through prayer. But she wasn't religious herself, and it made her uncomfortable whenever it was forced upon her.

She loved her family, but she’d love them more with distance.

Alanna’s Moonlight had been to the Lioness herself.

Ollie hadn’t been kidding. He really did like jigsaw puzzles. A countryside harvest festival was spread across the coffee table, and its repeating autumnal patterns held him and Grandma Young in a matching trance. Perched on their seat edges, they bonded over etiquette and strategy: start with the border. Then any sections that contain printed words. If someone is searching for one specific piece, but the other person finds it, it must be handed over, because it means more to the first person. And always save the sky—the hardest part of any puzzle—for last.