Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.

It wasn__ that she necessarily wanted to __ocialize_ at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

No child should ever be too sad to play.

What if just you and I hung out, like last summer?" Nick sat up and began twirling a lock of my wet hair around his finger. "Josh never needs to know.