We wear a lot of labels in our lives, and it's so very easy to be defined by them. We have grown somehow accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a size eight or a size fourteen, as a capricorn or a taurus, as single or in love.

That's for me to know, and for you to find out.

The Bagshaws aren't boys. They're bombs with very colorful fuses.

Kat picked up a folder labeled Senior. "What are these? Bank records?" She did a double take, looking at Hale. "Did your dad really pay two million dollars to the campaign to elect Ross Perot?" "I..." Hale said, stumbling for words and thumbing through another file. "Wow. I guess my cousin Charlotte isn't really my cousin." "Don't worry," Kat said. "It looks like there might be a kid in Queens who is.

Is Joe your father, Zach?' I don't know where the question came from, but it was out, and I couldn't take it back even if I'd wanted to. 'No.' Zach shook his head. 'I never knew my dad. I don't know anything about him.

He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.