This study investigated how 9 readers, aged 13-14 years, made sense of prose fiction, specifically short stories in the British school system. Subjects wrote down their impressions of selected texts in the text margins, followed by student-led individual or group discussions that were audio-recorded. Findings revealed Past-Oriented Predictions (POPs), Present-Oriented Predictions (PROPs), and Future-Oriented Predictions (FOPs). The advantage to reviewing responses as predictions permits comparison of the text's temporal organization with the operations that the reader performs on the text while reading it. POPs, PROPs, and FOPs demonstrate that it is possible to use narratology in the precise description of the form that responses take during reading. In this way, texts have a pre-existing structure, yet readers are reshaping this structure during the act of reading. It is suggested that the narratological organization of time is an appropriate place to begin, yet reading should not be reduced to a set of narratologically-derived categories. (Contains 15 references.) (NAV)