You're right . . . you can't go back. No matter how much you want to, you never can

Just once, I wanted to lose something without the whole world watching.

He looks trapped, helpless and furious, and that’s a feeling I know too well. Know how much it hurts. Know how it holds you down, how every day there are a thousand little ways to see there is nothing you can do to change who or what you are.

I don't know how I know that, but I do. I can feel the beat of that truth inside me. Taste it bitter on my tongue. Sometimes, like now, I didn't think I want to know who I really am.

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.

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.

Cute" is one of those words people use when they know you're smart enough to realize "you've got so much personality" means "you're ugly.