195

She said it was going to go right out the window, and there it went.  Right out the window.  Frannie didn't even bother opening the window first.  Smash, crash...free fall...more crash.  Some yelling.  That laptop was old, anyhow.  Frannie didn't care about anything, or anybody, it seemed.  Could have killed somebody out on the sidewalk, but that was just like her to do the horrible thing she promised.  She always kept those promises.

194

The forest had always seemed untouched by humanity to Veena, though the fact there was a path through it should have told her otherwise, until she found the cemetery.  Billa had told her it would be there, and he swore it as the truth upon his sword.  She followed his instructions, and the path, until she saw the dead oak tree, smooth and white, having dropped its bark in great scales now buried among the ferns.  Billa had said to step off the path after the tree and go ten paces into the forest.  Veena hated it when her brother was right.

193

She didn't think she lead a lonely life, though she knew her life fit the parameters.  Jenny lived an interior life.  A life where her imagination told her how scary the world was and how inept she was and how inappropriate her thoughts were, so they stayed inside.  As did she.  Jenny's room was her world, and going out of it got harder every day.  People looked at her when she went out, and people talked to her so she'd have to answer, and that wouldn't do.

Jenny was lonely, but thought she was self-sufficient, and her mother worried about her endlessly.  Deeply.  Hoveringly.  Smotheringly.  Jenny's fears about the world were compounded by her mother, who thought the incessant, gentle nudges helped, when really, they were like pushing repeatedly on a bruise.

192

Heather felt her tether tenuously.  It stretched and swung and slipped.  She hung, her hands hugging, her fingers tightening, yet sliding nonetheless.  Loosely, she lost, kicking and swinging, wheeling and keening, windy and whipping, falling, but not falling because there was no bottom.