Book Preview THE BLOOD WOULDN’T WASH OUT. It ran red, red, red, down over my hands, curling over the bruises on my wrists and the scabs on my knuckles. The water pouring from the faucet, hot enough to steam the mirror, should have diluted it to pale pink and then clear nothing. But it just…wouldn’t … Read more
Book Preview BLACK IS THE COLOR THAT IS NO COLOR AT ALL. Black is the color of a child’s still, empty bedroom. The heaviest hour of night—the one that traps you in your bunk, suffocating in another nightmare. It is a uniform stretched over the broad shoulders of an angry young man. Black is the … Read more
Book Preview ONE SAM I DON’T forget faces. I don’t forget anything my eyes have landed on—not the smallest detail of the white flowering wallpaper in our neighbors’ house, not the cursive letters written on my classroom’s whiteboard, not the numbers that flashed on the screen as the man in the white coat adjusted my … Read more
Book Preview THE DREAM FIRST MADE AN APPEARANCE MY SECOND WEEK AT THURMOND, AND IT CAME TO VISIT AT LEAST TWICE A MONTH. I guess it made sense that it was born there, behind the camp’s humming electric fence. Everything about that place withered you down to your worst, and it didn’t matter how many … Read more
Book Preview SOMETIMES, even when the roads are quiet and the others are asleep, she lets herself worry she made the wrong choice. It’s not that she doesn’t like the group—she does. Really. They stick together and they play it smart, driving on side streets as much as they can instead of the highways, with … Read more
Book Preview WHEN THE WHITE NOISE WENT OFF, we were in the Garden, pulling weeds. I always reacted badly to it. It didn’t matter if I was outside, eating in the Mess Hall, or locked in my cabin. When it came, the shrieking tones blew up like a pipe bomb between my ears. Other girls … Read more