The envelope landed in front of my plate like a verdict. White, heavy, unbent, it slid across the linen with a soft hiss…
By the time the dean said my name, the only thing I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat and the…
The first hit slammed Ethan so hard his teeth clacked together and he tasted metal and Gatorade. “Hey! Quit it!” he grunted, shoved…
By the time the motel lights started flickering, the baby had finally stopped crying. A neon VACANCY sign buzzed outside the thin door,…
By third period, Mrs. Daniels’ voice was shaking so hard the American flag above the whiteboard trembled with it. “If we don’t get…
The first time a grown man screamed in my face on an American tennis court, the sky over North Carolina was so blue…
The donut hit the floor before Hannah even saw it coming. One second she was at the edge of the crowded cafeteria, clutching…
The first thing Cindy Clark saw when she opened her eyes was the nail. A single, bent nail, jutting out of the attic…
By the time the first shot cracked over the harbor, the sky above Providence, Rhode Island, looked like it was on fire. Red…
The first thing he saw was the ceiling. Not a familiar ceiling—no glow-in-the-dark stars he’d stuck up as a kid, no faint water…
The first punch never landed on skin. It landed on air—on the silence of a studio in Burbank, California—shattering it with a barked…
The first time Mark saw the white dust, it floated through the air like dirty snow, drifting down over the eagle painted on…
By the time the fireworks went off above the arena in Los Angeles, the sky looked like it was catching fire. Fifty thousand…
On Friday nights in Maple Ridge, California, the strip mall by the freeway usually glowed with the same predictable neon—fast food arches, a…
A streak of blue light slashed across the morning haze over Springfield, Ohio, like the sky itself had been cut open. For a…
The first time Caleb McCalister called a war hero “lady” like it was an insult, the November sun over Southern California was so…
By the time Brandon wished his parents had never met, he was staring at a chipped bowl of Hamburger Helper in a cramped…
The mashed potatoes on Julia’s plate looked more like a tiny snowman than a side dish. She’d given him olive eyes, a pretzel-stick…
The day Daniel tried to rewrite his life, downtown Los Angeles was shining like it had never hurt anyone. Sunlight ricocheted off glass…
By the time Jack realized he’d lost his free ride, his brand-new electric guitar was locked in the trunk of a car he…
By the time Kevin started screaming, the hallway at Brookside Middle looked like every other American school corridor on a Tuesday morning—fluorescent lights…
The siren of an ambulance wailed somewhere out on the 405 while Jennifer Santos stood in the marble foyer of a Los Angeles…
By the time Shay realized the champagne cost more than her car, she was already halfway in love with the man across the…
By the time the email that was supposed to change Flint Carter’s life finally loaded, the Friday night lights of the school stadium…
The first time the Statue of Liberty tried to save Ren, she was standing in a fluorescent-lit classroom in suburban California, not New…
The ring light made their California living room look brighter than it had any right to be at seven in the morning. “Hey,…
The first thing anyone noticed wasn’t the girl. It was the smell. It hit the eighth-grade classroom at Jefferson Middle School in central…
The robot froze with one hand in midair, fingers still glowing blue, as if someone had pressed pause on the future. Thirty feet…
The crown hit the polished stage of the Los Angeles ballroom with a sound so sharp it might as well have been a…
The first time Lauren ran away from her mother, it was only three steps. Three steps across the cracked concrete of the Bookside…