Alexandra Bracken

Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

__ don't want to lose you__hen why are you the one that keeps letting go?

The question stayed with me every day, through every class, through every Op. I felt its teeth tighten around the back of my neck each time I was dismissed without a second look; it had locked it__ jaws and wouldn__ let me or my conscience go.

I had the strangest feeling-like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place-that i wasn't what I once was, and wasn't at all what I was meant to be.

I can't--I can't think about anything or anyone else," he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. "I can't think straight when you're around. I can't sleep. It feels like I can't breathe--I just--""Liam, please," I begged. "You're tired. You're barely over being sick. Let's just... Can we just go back to the others?""I love you." He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. "I love you every second of everyday, and I don't understand why, or how to make it stop--" He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my mind."I know it's wrong; I know it down to my damn bones. And I feel like I'm sick. I'm trying to be a good person, but I can't. I can't do this anymore.

Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?' he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.'It depends,' I say. 'I think you can probably honor someone's memory, but you can't live for them, because that means living in the past.

...what does the future look like?...'A deep blue, fading into golds and reds-like fire on a horizon. Afterlight. It's a sky that wants you to guess if the sun is about to rise or set.

You'd be surprised how little voice you have when you lose everything.

When it came to adults, it was better not to talk. They had a way of hearing one thing and processing it as something else. No reason to give them an excuse to hurt you.

What was the point of being holed up with someone who didn't believe in me when I had people out there who did?

And the open road rolled out in front of us.

What mattered was that these beliefs had swept through the souls of everyone else like a plague. He couldn't see the end of it. Even a hundred years in the future, he knew, the roots still had not been fully pulled up from society. Wherever, whenever he went, the color of his skin set the boundaries of what he could achieve, and there was very little--if any--recourse for finding a way around it.

Like any girl, she still felt the echoes from earlier eras of repression. She'd been raised by a mother who'd fought hard to get a wage she deserved, to have access to education when she lacked every advantage, to travel on her own terms. The idea she was being asked-that she was expected to simply play along-made the blood throb in her veins. She was already in the damn stays. Wasn't the enough?

Never, never, never. I am never going to forget you.

She imagined she could taste the storm in him, the battering winds of desperation and frustration that met her own, blow for blow.

He could silence me, but Rob had no power over my mind

I'm not... I'm not without a heart,' he heard Sophia say, her chin raised, eyes straight ahead. 'I'm not. I just don't have the luxury of being soft. I am trying to survive.

Now isn´t the time to change yourself to fit into the world... you should be changing the world to accept you. To let you exist as you are, without being cut open and damaged.