Charles and I had a blast working with our team of authors putting together Pick-Up Game, a cross between an anthology and a novel. What could we do next? We—and, we hope, readers—especially enjoyed the braid, as individual stories written by different authors shifted characters and story lines, making each one both a piece in itself and part of a larger whole. How else could we use that format? Pick-Up Game was set in one spot, the West 4th Street basketball courts in Manhattan, on one day. Could we find a new weave with a new challenge?

Charles knew, almost at once, where to go next: initiation. The word comes from the Latin for “to begin,” but it can also carry the meaning of “to go through the proper rite or ceremony to be admitted into a group, or to become a member of a secret society.” So much of being a teenager is about crossing lines, reaching a new status or standing, and gaining previously hidden knowledge, whether that is in the socially sanctioned steps of communion, bar/bat mitzvah, quinceañera, or graduation; the intimate bonds of friendship, secrets, and sexuality; or the dark vows of gangs, guns, and crime. You could fairly define all of teenage as a sequence of initiations dreamed about, yearned for, accomplished, regretted, found marvelous, found disappointing, found life-changing, passed, all the way along. We had a theme. Now, how to use that theme in our weave of authors?

We turned to Rita to start us off, and she cleverly and carefully laid out her lines, giving enough character and setting for other authors to explore, all around a funeral home and a corpse. Death would start the life of this book. We didn’t know where the authors would take the stories. Their instructions were to link, in some way, to the first story and to work with the theme of initiation. The wonder of the process was how their stories built and how two key characters began to emerge: Kevin, and, well, I’ll leave you to decide the other. Before photographers had digital cameras, they used film, and the negatives had to be developed in a darkroom, where they went through various chemical baths. As the sheet of images emerged, you began to see, for the first time, what the photo would look like printed. That’s what this book was like: slowly characters and stories, linked but separate, began to reveal themselves.

But it wasn’t easy. We owe a big—no, a huge—shout-out to our authors, who accepted the kaleidoscopic nature of creating a book like this. Each new story slightly—or significantly—changed the others. That sent ripples all through the chain, even back to Rita’s first story. And then as she and others revised, changes rippled through once again, and again. We were so grateful to the authors who went back, and back, and back again to iron out the creases and tie the book together. And this went beyond lonely revisions; authors began sending notes to each other, being extra sets of eyes or guiding hands, helping build our joint book, helping weave the braid we’d envisioned from the start.

But where would it end? Where does a novel that begins with a death and weaves through many dark initiations go? Marina’s story answered that for us. We were thrilled: our novel-in-stories had the true arc of initiation, of transformation, of change, hard-won. And perhaps on another level, that is what this book meant for all of us: we know the initiations of being a teenager can be terrifying as well as thrilling and can have the most extreme consequences. Every author, I sensed, had a personal need to honor young people finding their way, negotiating choices, deciding which lines to cross. It can be okay, they seemed to want to say, even when for now it is not. Because ultimately what the initiate gains is knowledge, wisdom about the world and its ways. The Norse god Odin gave up an eye to gain wisdom. In a sense we all do. This is a novel-in-short-stories about the bargains we make to cross lines, to join in, to be accepted, to begin to know, at whatever cost, who we are. Scarred—no, graced—with the knowledge we have earned, the next phase of our lives begins.