Then I heard someone laugh. I wished I didn't know whose laugh it was, but I knew Will's laugh just like I knew he had a small scar right above his left elbow. You couldn't be reluctantly lust-ridden for someone without noticing stuff about them.

I didn't feel anything watching him go. I didn't even wish I did.

I love books. I like that the moment you open one and sink into it you can escape from the world, into a story that's way more interesting that yours will ever be.

It could be enough, maybe, or at least a start, but the problem is that at night I tumble into dreams that aren't dreams at all. I tumble into memories and wake up aching for a dying world and a quiet, cold life that offered me nothing but sitting in a still room.

Like a heart, and I wish mine wasn't beating.

I love the me I am with him. I’m the girl who has Dave. I’m Lauren, Dave’s girlfriend. I’m someone better than Lauren Smith, who no one noticed till Dave came along. The thing is, that girl isn’t me and I know it. But when I’m with him, I feel like I could be her. That if something in me was just–I don’t know, shifted a little or something, smoothed down–people would think of me the way they think of Dave, and everything would always be perfect. I would be perfect.

I’m broken, I have cut myself wide open. I can see my heart and it is not what I believed it was, it is not good and kind and all the things I have always thought I am.