The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.

I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

What Dino spent most of his time doing was hiring and firing new managers. Since he ditched William Tiero three-plus years ago, he just want through these poor guys like you go through a bag of M&M's when you've got your period. Consume, and on the the next.

The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.

You were a stone wall, a fort in high, unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.