Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

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.

Tibby's wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.

Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

He no longer represented someday a possibility. He represented a road not taken a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see it anymore.

I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting.