All those days had been removed, simply and precisely, whole weeks brimming with cloudless blue skies neatly severed and discarded. We needed Beth's name shouted not whispered.

The cicadas were singing a song.
It was a one-noted, one-worded; The words sounded like "please".
They were singing and singing and singing and the whole world was falling down.

Our house was like sleeping beauties palace after the enchanted spell is cast

This is because secrets are terrible things.
Even the simplest ones

Big secrets were catastrophic. However hard you try to hide them, they bob to the surface and you must go over them again and again. They are taken out so often they become worn smooth as a river stone. You have to carry them around you like a baby. The secret grows until you feel like you are a skin that covers it, a thin skin, easily split, ripe

Ophelia,' said the boy. He said it very quietly. She didn't like the way he said that at all. He sounded sad and as though he expected more from her.
'And how do you know my name anyways?' she said. 'I never told you it, not once.'
'I heard it once, a long time ago.'
He was full of mysterious sentences like that.