The Secrets We Kept

by Lara Prescott

One might think this scenario plays out only in high school or college, but the politics of friendship are tricky at every age.

They had their satellites, but we had their books. Back then, we believed books could be weapons—that literature could change the course of history. The

After assuming a cover, I found it harder and harder to go back to my real life. I’d imagine what it would be like to completely disappear into someone new. To become someone else, you have to want to lose yourself in the first place.

Dostoyevsky threw me a rope in the fog and began to tug. When he wrote that “the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,”

“Only privileged men romanticize tragedy.”

All that was left to me was to remember.