The Ballast Boy

But Sam had not been there.

He had plunged too deep. Adam had been injured, it's true, playing with his classmates in the ravine. But the story that had just unfolded in his mind was mostly a fabrication, with details filled in by his imagination which, he noted, had spun up in its capabilities from a quieted temperance to the roar of a lion. His head hurt. Remember the difference between what's real and what's my imagination, he instructed himself.

The bulk of his construction was true. The ...