Pretty little things, broken promises are. I’ve never seen two quite the same shade of hurt. I’ve got a full shelf full of the indigo hues of disappointment, dresser drawers spilling into each other with orange-red angers, and purple regrets stacked in tilting rows along my desk. The best, most magnificent kind are the speckled ones, glittering all colors of the rainbow and dashed with white where all the colors overlap. I spend hours poking them through with needles...

    Aspen glared at the landscape slipping away through the backseat window, too angry to sit in the passenger seat beside her mom. They’d left behind the towering hills topped with snow-frosted pine trees that flanked the highway. Now the road was thin, meandering towards a destination Aspen did not ever want to arrive at. The view out of the frosted glass showed clusters of dilapidated buildings with halfhearted holiday greetings chalked on the doors of the few stores that didn’t...

    In the city, you can feel this hum, a pulse of sorts. It reminds you that everyone in the city--in the glowing apartments and office buildings, on the swarming crosswalks, in those cars, you--is alive and connected by the hum, and that the city is alive, a man-made animal with scaffolding bones and cement skin. I absolutely love it. Now, sitting in my grandmother’s second guest room, lit only by the computer screen (white page, black letters) and its keyboard...