Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

“It’s forever down there,” the captain says. “Let no one tell you any different.”

My maps show us the path, but your visions show us the way. You are the compass, Caden Bosch. You are the compass!”

It makes me think of a friend I once had, who thought that north was whatever direction he was facing. Now I think that maybe he was right.

there’s no such thing as down, because eventually down is up.

I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.

So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.

The pain of knowing is killing me more than killing me would kill me, so I jump just to end it.

Forget solar energy—if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations.

“Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?”

There are many ways in which the “check brain” light illuminates, but here’s the screwed-up part: the driver can’t see it. It’s like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that’s been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they’re really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.

It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you’ve always felt like this, and there’s no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares.

We always look for the signs we missed when something goes wrong. We become like detectives trying to solve a murder, because maybe if we uncover the clues, it gives us some control. Sure, we can’t change what happened, but if we can string together enough clues, we can prove that whatever nightmare has befallen us, we could have stopped it, if only we had been smart enough. I suppose it’s better to believe in our own stupidity than it is to believe that all the clues in the world wouldn’t have changed a thing.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.

“what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.”

Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

The weird thing is, hearing stories like this makes me feel a kind of kinship with the Almighty, because it proves that even God has psychotic episodes.

“When the truth hurts, we always hate the messenger.”

For the captain there is no history, no yesterday, no memory. “Live for the moment and the moment after,” he once told me. “Never for the moment before.” It’s a creed that defines him.

One in three U.S. families is affected by the specter of mental illness.