Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

but not even that can take away the hellish black-hole feeling that I’m still standing on the ledge of something unthinkable.

That is to say, I’m among them, but I don’t feel with them. Used to be I could easily fit in with whatever friends I was hanging out with. Some people need a clique to make them feel safe. They have this little protective bubble of friends that they rarely venture away from. I was never like that. I could always flow freely from table to table, group to group. The athletes, the brainiacs, the hipsters, the band kids, the skaters. I was always well liked and well accepted by all, and I always managed to fit in like a chameleon. How strange, then, that now I find myself in a clique of one, even when I’m with a group.

“Since you asked the question, you will prophesize answers.”

Then we squeeze ourselves back into the skin of who we were before all this. We put the pieces back together and get on with things.” That makes me think about Skye, the puzzler, and the jigsaw piece she gave me.

Mackenzie’s tough, but a psychiatric ward for young people is no place for a young person.

And I mourn my fifteenth year. And how I will never, from now until the end of time, be able to complete it the way it should have been.

We are, however, creatures of containment. We want all things in life packed into boxes that we can label. But just because we have the ability to label it, doesn’t mean we really know what’s in the box.