How to Make Friends with the Dark

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Her face softens and I feel guilty. Once I overheard her say to Bonita, “I try to tell Tiger all the things I never got to hear, you know?”

It’s not nighttime yet, though. The day is still bright and hot and dusty enough when I get to The Pit, which is what we call Grunyon’s emptied pool and the three home-built half-pipes on the land behind his house. His parents, Louise and Mary, run a coffee shop/diner/bookstore in a series of interconnected Airstreams on the property, which is probably highly illegal, but no one cares, because coffee. There’s nothing,” I say. “Well, peanut butter. You can have a big fat hot cup of steaming peanut butter.” After making your way into the lobby, you will notice that your character is sitting on a chair with two '+' symbols around it. You will be able to use the icons to add your friends to your party.

Now things are even more complicated, because Kai found out a few weeks ago that he’s leaving at the end of the summer for some year-long schlepp in Germany, where he’ll become a completely different person and probably fall for some completely cool and super-confident German girl with blunt-cut blond hair and red lips and bigger boobs than mine who will kiss him like it’s no big deal. Ja. Dark and Darker is much easier and more enjoyable when done with a party of friends. Here's how you can invite your friends to play the game with you: His face isn’t like it usually is, open and goofy and smiling, all Kai-like, glasses slipping down his nose, hair in his eyes. I roll my eyes and groan. “You have to tell me those things,” I answer. “You’re my mom. It’s in your job description.”

I did not think it would happen in a Biology lab room that still stank of the cows’ eyeballs we’d dissected a few days before. Cows’ eyeballs are surprisingly springy and full of fluid, which spurts everywhere. In case you didn’t know. Jennifer Niven, author of All the Bright Places, called it “breathtaking and heartbreaking.” We can’t wait for this beautiful novel to finally be out in the world on April 9, 2019, so we are giving you a sneak peek. Start reading today!My mom’s voice is very, very loud, and yet, to me, it sounds like she’s calling from very far away, that’s how angry I am. I’m embarrassed and alone on a little island. Out in the desert, the coyotes start up, one by one, howling and wailing, lonely in the dark, and they do not stop. They don’t stop. My phone buzzes again. My stomach yelps. Lupe looks down at my bag, curious. “ What is so important? I wonder. Did baby girl forget her lu—” Mom trembles. Her shirt’s damp, like she’s been sweating. She must need a cigarette. “I’m sorry,” she whispers into my hair. “I don’t know what happened. What a headache. Bonita leaving, the daycare closing. I just . . . it was a lot all at once, and I guess I stressed. Did you even have any dinner last night?”

Cake frowns and peers at the phone. Her expression goes from resigned to curious to . . . horrified. Her mouth drops open.

It comes out too loud. Maybe even louder than too loud, because it hurts even my ears, and it hurts me somewhere deep inside, too. In fact, I think I screamed it. My heart does a little jump as Kai sits down next to me. “Hey,” he says, shading his eyes from the sun. “I’ve got bizcochitos. You wanna walk to Thunder and hang out?” Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) is a complicated, deep and extremely ancient set of beliefs. Based upon the teachings of the Vedas & the commentaries on the Vedas (Upanishads).

Our faces are so close. If I leaned in just a bit more . . . My stomach makes an unattractive gurgle. I mean, not yet. Maybe. Someday. Like, after the dance, maybe. Isn’t that how things work? You kind of slide into something? All I know is from books and movies and watching other kids at Eugene Field and remembering how it was with Cake and the boy from Sierra Vista. I mean, what do I ever do without my mom anyway? Nothing. I go to school, sometimes I watch the skaters at The Pit, I come home, I read, I . . . I look at Mae-Lynn Carpenter again. She is the last stop on the High School Ladder of Desolation. They should probably just name it after her. We hope to survive but we are becoming worn down and desensitised. Our feelings are being taken away, our homes, our belongings, our family, our memories, our lives.But it did. Something happened when I met his eyes. Suddenly they were no longer just brown; they were instead a gemlike and transfixing shade of beyond brown with dazzling tints of mesmerizing yellow. Suddenly the smear of acne across his jawline wasn’t something I was embarrassed for, for him, but something I found tender, and wanted to touch. I mean, I hadn’t not noticed that over the past year or so he’d kind of filled out, not a lot, just a bit, so that he wasn’t quite like a bendy straw anymore. Just do it. Rip off the Band-Aid, Tiger. Then you can flee the vehicle and not have to deal with her until tonight. I rush out of the cafeteria with my head down, like I always do around here, hoping no one will notice weird June Tolliver’s weird daughter. There’s a weird triangular dusting of hair on Taran’s chin, like he’s deliberately trying to look like the spawn of Satan. I have pretty much hated Taran and his twin brother since the day they moved here three years ago from Phoenix. They stood in a lanky lump at the front of seventh-grade English as the teacher introduced them and Taran’s eyes immediately zeroed in on me and he blurted out, “Dang, those titties!” Causing the boys in the class to erupt in laughter and me to slink down as far as I could go in my seat. If the floor could have absorbed me, I’d have been eternally grateful. So grateful I probably would have even agreed to just rename myself Floor. Floor Tolliver.