Tibby was shaking her head. "What?" Bailey asked. "Nothing. Just that you suprise me every day," Tibby said. Bailey smiled at her. "I like that you let yourself be suprised.

Tibby cried into her soup when it finally came. "I'm scared... ," she told it. The carrots and peas made no reply, but she felt better for having told them.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

You just have to let people love you in the way they can

The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn't do in the Pants --- like picking your nose.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love one another. We're nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? - Carmen