Excerpt: One Inch Left

"I've been waiting for this adventure my whole life," Ari said, eyes suddenly filling with tears. Again. She never used to be this weepy until she had encountered Midnightback that day in the woods. "And I can't even appreciate it. And home's never felt like home, either." She cleared her throat. "There's always been something wrong about it. It's the smell of the water, it's like everything is so close to being correct, but just not there." She paused, struggling to find the words to express what she could not. It was something, a deep feeling that she had never told anyone before, and had never gone away. A slow burning feeling in her heart and mind that something was so close to being right--but was just not. "It's small changes, like the color of a stone is not right, or maybe the position of a tree or a wall. It's like the whole world that I live in, everywhere on earth, or wherever I go, it's like everyting has just been moved one inch to the left."

Henry, for a short, rare time, was rendered speechless. What does anyone say to that? He might have felt bored or like he was stagnating sometimes, but he had never felt that the entire world was somehow off-kilter. It was a small, tiny, barely noticeable change. It was a small, tiny change that shifted everything to the left, and shifted Ari's entire universe. What a difference once inch left makes.