...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go." From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102.

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky.

It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

She was disappearing a little more each day, so thin, so frail, a wisp of smoke. One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her.

He believed in dreams, in endings that people told you could never happen, in disappointments reversed and luck that lasted.