Excerpt from The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The boys turn quiet and they drink even more' - ­cheap beer bought with fake IDs. They keep their hands in their pockets those first few days and just try to stay out of the way of the girls. It is as if the boys can sense it, even in those girls, in their easy closeness and their interlocking arms: the whole history of women and suffering, the generations of practice at grief.

To the girls, it feels wrong to get dressed. It feels wrong to wear makeup. Hair goes unwashed and legs go unshaven and contacts float untouched in solution. They wear glasses, it is then revealed to the boys. More than half of those girls wear glasses.

Her poor mother, the girls say to one another, their knees clutched tight to their chests, as if the shock has turned them even younger. They picture their own mothers. They imagine the phones ringing in their own kitchens, back home, in other towns in other states: Arizona, Nebraska, Illinois. I can't imagine it, the girls say to one another, I just can't imagine.

The funeral is in Kansas. It's too far to go.

"We should do something for her parents," says one of the girls. They are coming the next day, the girls have heard, to collect Kara's things. "We should order flowers."

The girls all agree right away. There is an intense desire to do the proper thing. This feels like their induction. Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.

They settle on lilies, two dozen, in white. Everyone signs the card.

They can think of nothing else useful to do, but a certain yearning persists. Meanwhile, a new generosity flows between them. How small their other concerns begin to seem, how meaningless, compared. Fights end, and slights are forgiven, and two of the girls reconcile by phone with the faraway boys who they loved so much in high school and who they had thought, until now, they'd outgrown.

But still, the girls want something more. They long to be of use.

When Mei walks down the hall, her arms crossed and her head down and her black hair pulled tight into a braid, the girls notice her as they have never noticed her before.

She shouldn't blame herself, they all agree. None are sure of her name, the Chinese girl, or maybe Japanese, who lived in the same room as Kara. There is no way she could have known that Kara needed help.

"We should tell her that it's not her fault," one of them whispers. "We should tell her that she shouldn't feel bad."

But they stay where they are.

"Does she speak En­glish?" says another.

"Of course she does," says another one. "I think she's from here, right?"

Somewhere, from another room, there floats the smell of microwave popcorn. No one is going to class.

The basket of lilies arrives that afternoon, but it is less than the girls had hoped, unable, in the end, to accomplish what they had wanted, which is to convey what they can say in no other way, something essential for which they do not know the words.

Kara's parents: their faces are pale and hollowed. She is a woman in a gray sweater. She is Kara with different skin. The father wears a beard and a flannel shirt. He is a man who thirty years earlier might have been any one of those boys of the floor, slouching in a doorframe, his hands in his pockets like theirs, unaware of what is waiting up ahead.

Slowly, they begin to pack their daughter's things.

The girls grow shy at the sight of them. They hide out in their rooms, afraid to say the wrong thing. For a while, the only sound on the floor is the harsh crack of packing tape, torn from its dispenser, or sometimes the clinking of emptied hangers, the soft slip of dresses being packed into boxes.

Watching those parents from afar, the girls are quick to mistake all the ordinary signs of midlife' - ­those wrinkles in his forehead, those dark circles beneath her eyes' - ­for evidence of grief instead of age. And maybe, in a way, the girls are right: those faces are proof of the passage of years, and it is the passage of years that has led them right here to this task.

Excerpted from The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. Copyright © 2019 by Karen Thompson Walker. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.