If Ketterdam has taught me anything, it's that you can always bleed a little more.

They had an ordinary life, full of ordinary things-if love can ever be called that.

A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they were all the same: Make me someone new.

What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary.

When had she stopped being a child? The first time a guy whistled at her out of a car window when she was walking to school? The moment she started wondering how she looked when she ran, what jiggled or bounced, instead of the pace she was setting? The first time she'd kept from raising her hand because she didn't want to seem too smart or too eager? No one had sung? No one had told her how much she would lose until the time for grieving was long over.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.