This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.

I survive at the edge of friends circles.

People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.