The Longest Distance (short story excerpt)

Even when you don’t ask you have asked by the way you look at me—by how you try to hold my eye, try to suggest (a touching gesture) that it is concern you feel, not curiosity. But if I had answers don’t you think that I’d confess them? That I’d have said by now, put out a proclamation, that Joelle died for this, or for that. That she died because. All I can tell you is what you know, which is: Joelle is gone. She’s the slash of black you see just after lightning breaks the sky. She’s the place where a cliff stops being stone and becomes the air that you could fall through.

From "The Longest Distance," a short story soon forthcoming in No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen collection also featuring An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, and Jacqueline Woodson. And who had the idea for the anthology in the first place? Why, Miss Jill Santopolo, of course.