From the critically acclaimed author of Oliver Loving and The Story of Forgetting is a short story about friendship, loss and growing up.______________________Life lesson: the most soothing salve available to the man who has recently torched his own face is a regular application of wickedness with a pretty girl.The choices we make can follow us, and when half of your face is torched you can't escape the past. As a freshman in college he meets friends and attends parties, red cup in tow. His face is a Rorschach test to his friends, though he'll never tell them what really happened.In his group of friends there is Ava- sardonic, infatuating and alarmingly beautiful Ava. But he's too burnt up to be considered as anything more than a'bestie' to a girl like her...

Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book,The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature. Stefan's stories and essays have appeared inThe New York Times, The Guardian, NPR's Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan lives in Brooklyn.