The magic fading is never fun. Drifting away is never easy. Maybe it’s absent mindedness, or maybe it’s the fact that the damn app refuses to show you any more personalised prompts.
It was scary, at first. The feeling. The weird tickle I get on my lips when people I love kiss other people. I thought at first it was only romantic. The first time it happened, I was told five minutes later that Tyler had kissed Jesse on the swing set. But that belief faded quickly. For one, my parents were definitely never romantic for me. But my father kissed my mother and there it was. And the...
I glared at him over the candles. “Dude, we’re 25, it’s just a tradition, just let me make the stupid wish.”
Jonah glared right back. “You can’t say it out loud! It won’t come true otherwise!”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. Jonah had always been like this, and it had been more endearing when we were kids, I believed the stuff he said. But I had to comply, so I blew out my candles, wishing I didn’...
The forest had always been my place. It was my escape from everything, where I could lay and read and sing and talk about whatever I wanted without judgmental stares. Birds and bugs weren’t rude like people, they’d like anyone well enough if they gave them seeds and sugar water.
But the forest wasn’t only my place. It was others, too, like the birds and the bugs and the squirrels and the trees. ...
“You two are like lemmings. One goes, then the next. If you jumped, she’d go too.”
That was what everyone had told me growing up. That my sister and I were two peas in a pod, puzzle pieces, two halves of a whole. The lemming comparison was uniquely my grandfather. But it got the same message across: my sister and I were alike in every way that mattered, except unlike any other comparison, he ackn...