Every plan is a house of cards.

in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she'd licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.

Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too. She never told him and she never, ever will.

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then surely you should be friend to my friend.

I'm afraid that whatever I touch is spoilt by the contact." "I'm not scared of being spoiled," Val said.

We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.