For three years they called me a freak—and I stayed silent—until they touched my little sister in front of everyone, and the truth I buried finally came out and changed everything.

wrapped around Lily, using my own skeletal structure to absorb the immense kinetic forces that threatened to crush her into the metal floorboards. Around us, the massive hoppers behind our car were leaping off the steel tracks, plowing into the rocky dirt of the cut with the force of a localized earthquake.

The boxcar listed heavily to the left, the continue reading …