..all I left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I have to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.

And now I am here, as alone as I've ever been. I am seventeen years old. This is not how it's suppose to be. This is not how my life is suppose to turn out.

Every fiction has its base in fact.

Willem tsk-tsks. "You Americans are so violent. I'm Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.

Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.

We were both music-obsessed, each in our own way. If we didn't entirely understand the other person's obsession, it didn't matter, because we understood our own.