The author describes two students creating narrative versions of an event from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to portray conflicts in characters' interactions to address the issue of sex abuse. Through rewriting events in texts, students gain a sense of how use of dialogue can serve to portray larger underlying tensions between characters' competing perspectives and beliefs. Through this reflection, students recognize how language use as "talk-in-interaction" fosters positive versus conflicted relationships, insights that may transfer to their everyday interactions with others.