56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most.

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

“Do you ever think,” Karl says, “that maybe you have your shit together, it’s just that your shit doesn’t look like everybody else’s?”