..."Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others’ lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine.

He is nothing to look at, and yet I can’t stop looking at him. There is something beautiful in how his face is made, how all the tiny flaws blend together into something more perfect than perfection could ever be.

I-I don't usually go around throwing rocks at people's windows. Or saying that I've wanted to kiss you since your first day at work, when you wanted to know why we had three codes for fish sandwiches when we only sold one kind.

How come you like Josh so much anyway? All he does is sit around drinking overpriced coffee and bitching about how awful things are" "He cares about the world." "If he cared about the world, he'd donate the ten thousand dollars he must spend on coffee every year to charity. That would be doing something.

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

I thought living dead girls couldn't feel pain, thought I was emptied out but I'm not, I'm not.

The thing is, that world doesn't exist. All growing up means is that your realize no one will come along to fix things. No one will come along to save you.