Such a Pretty Girl 
MTV Books


     The passenger door opens.
     One sneakered foot is planted on the driveway. The other joins it.
     The Nikes are blindingly new. Size twelve.
     My mother has been shopping for him.
     The jeans are also new. If I allow my gaze to travel higher -- which I won't -- I'll see the solid gold baseball charm on a chain that my mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday nestled in his coarse, whorled chest hair.
     My front teeth throb as the memory of the charm bangs against them.
     "Hello, Meredith."
     The voice is quiet, kind, hoarse with history...and it destroys me. A sick, writhing knot of old love and despair lays me open worse than the first time and the force of it almost takes me down. I lock my knees, trying not to sway. This was not supposed to happen. I spent years steeling myself, reliving every rotten moment over and over again to make myself immune, hiding from nothing so there would be nothing hidden left to cripple me, and I thought I'd made it but now, with one simple greeting, I've already lost.
     "No, Daddy, no. Don't."
     "Meredith," he says again, soft and almost pleading, a voice I know, a voice that sends the nausea churning in my stomach straight up into my throat.
     I swallow hard and lift my chin in reply. It's all I can manage and more than he deserves.
     "Well." My mother plants her hands on her hips, peevish. "Is that the best welcome you can come up with? Why don't you come over here and give your father a hug?"
     Hug him? Touch him? How can she even suggest it?
     "It's okay. Don't push her, Sharon." He slams the passenger door and stretches, glances around the ominously silent court. Blinds twitch and a shade goes down, but he doesn't seem to notice. "Nice place. Peaceful. We have the rest of our lives to get reacquainted. Right, Chirp?"
     My head jerks up, the curtain parts, and for one piercing moment the predator and the prey lock gazes.




LEFTOVERS
MTV Books


     By the time you hit fifteen, there are certain survival lessons you'd better have learned.
     Like, that breasts are power. Sad to say, but it all comes down to a matter of supply and demand. Girls have them, guys want them. Even a skank is a hot commodity is she can offer up anything more than a couple of mosquito bites. Not saying she should offer them up, just saying she should recognize her advantage and not put out everytime some guy manages to string together a couple of compliments.
     Too bad that's all it takes sometimes.
     Being user-friendly doesn't mean you're going to be loved. Getting attention is not the same thing. Sometimes it's the exact opposite.
     And while we're talking about being used and abused, you should know that there are some things you tell and some things you handle by yourself, the best you can. You can't always rat and still hope to be saved when somebody does you wrong. The backlash will dog you till you die.
     Or till you wish you were dead.
     See, guys freak out. They hit critical mass and blast nuclear, white-hot anger out over the world like walking flame throwers.
     But girls freak in. They absorb the pain and bitterness and keep right on sponging it up until the drown.
     Maybe that's why nobody's real worried about girls going off and wreaking havoc. It's not that the seething hatred and need for revenge isn't there, hell no. It's just that instead of erupting and annihilating our tormentors, we destroy ourselves instead.
     Usually.


HOW IT ENDS
MTV Books


"I would not willingly peel back the scar tissue protecting the deepest chambers of my heart and reveal the bruised hollows pooled with the blood of old wounds -- the terror comes just thinking about it -- but now, facing darkness I am left with no choice.
I love you, and because of that I am going to try and raise the dead."
-- Louise Bell Closson, How It Ends
     

If you really want to hurt someone, if you're the type of person who smiles as you grind your heel down onto the white-knuckled grip of the desperate dangling off the edge of a burning building, then do this: tell your victim a devastating secret about a loved one, something that will change the way she thinks of them forever...but do it only after the loved one is gone, so she can never go back and ask them the truth.