You Go First: Part I

Other rabbit holes may lead to vast underground mazes known as warrens, which is where the rabbits live. “Warren” also describes a densely populated building.

There are about 1,500 species of starfish. They live primarily in the intertidal zone, which is also known as the littoral zone or foreshore.

Organisms along the intertidal zone are uniquely adept at surviving in harsh environments.

As if she didn’t know about Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacteria that teemed on bed rails, supply carts, and floors.

As if she wasn’t aware that it was an opportunistic parasite that preyed on people with weakened immune systems.

He’d been dedicated to a single feverish goal: to unseat his nemesis—a twelve-year-old girl named Lottie Lock—and become number one on the leaderboard.

He and Lottie had met on an online Scrabble message board specifically sanctioned for elementary school students, but Lottie lost access when she started middle school, so they decided to battle one-on-one to experience direct combat.

They exchanged dozens of texts back and forth over the summer—you call that a play?, sorry/not-sorry about your devastating loss, prepare to suffer my vernacular wrath, etc., etc.—but they also complimented worthy performances, like the time Ben played ANT and Lottie won with ANTHEM.

Ben considered it healthy to have a nemesis and he was determined to overtake first position with his own username: “Ben Boot,” in honor of fellow Ravenclaw Terry Boot, an obscure member of Dumbledore’s Army.

That’s when their serious faces morphed into something far more concerning: fake nonchalance.

The expression on his parents’ faces was unfamiliar, so the “announcement” was clearly significant.

The three of them were escaping the dregs of Louisiana and moving to Michigan.

They were both dark haired and gawky. They were both brilliant chemists. They both worked in industrial labs.

Lizards can regenerate, too—in fact, reptiles are some of the world's most resilient animals.

The impending assignment had taken her down several rabbit holes—starfish led to marine invertebrates; marine invertebrates led to sea anemones; sea anemones led to fossil records—but as she followed her mother to the recovery room, heart thumping with her footsteps, an image sprang into her head and she couldn’t shake it out: the starfish, a scalpel, and her hand on both.

Mrs. Lockard stopped in the sterile hospital hallway and turned around, both eyebrows raised.

The opposite of evolution was devolution. Complex species reverting to simpler forms.

It was a contested and controversial concept, but it fit Ben’s parents perfectly.

They had once been simple, single individuals. Then they got married and became a complex unit. Now they were regressing to their simpler form. No longer a family.

I realize neither of us is on social media, having decided it had the potential to eat away at our respective schedules and compromise our academic performance, but we do spend a lot of time on our phones, particularly texting and playing Scrabble and so forth.

Some people called her best friend “Bridge,” but Bridget didn’t care either way because she hated her name altogether. She said that “Bridget MacCauley” wasn’t sophisticated.

Bridget had thick, auburn hair and perfectly placed freckles that made her look older instead of younger.

Charlotte was so spindly that she seemed tall, even though she wasn’t.

Bridget stretched one of her long delicate arms toward an overhanging branch and snapped a pear from the tree.

But that didn’t negate the fact that Charlotte would be scolded for Bridget’s stolen fruit.
It didn’t seem to faze Bridget, though.

Locks of dark hair fell over Mateo’s eyes, and he always looked like he had a brooding secret that he was dying to tell, if only he could find the right person to confide in.

Magda’s hair was a perpetual mess.

Wind rustled and a shower of leaves fell on them.

When the breeze passed, Magda picked up one of the fallen leaves and held it gingerly by the stem.

He was still splayed across his bed and staring at the ceiling.

No one in this room was getting a divorce. Everything was in stasis.

Stasis. A state of equilibrium or stoppage. A state of unchanging.

He had several different teachers and he didn’t mind them too much (not even Mr. Brennamen, who taught advanced history in the most frustrating monotone imaginable), but thus far he had no friends, and now that his parents were getting divorced, it was clear that his entire world was crumbling, one brick at a time, and landing in rubble at his feet.

Enthusiasts believe that Scrabble is an ideal board game because it's the perfect blend of strategy and luck. You never know which letters you'll get, so there are elements you can't control. But if you know how to use what you're dealt, you can triumph.

When she was seven years old, he pulled the game board from the closet and set it on the dining room table. Charlotte was captivated because they never used the dining room table for anything except holiday dinners.