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.

I'm sorry I kissed you- it was selfish and it upset you- but you can't ask me to pretend I didnt want to.

If they were real, then maybe the world was big enough to have magic in it. And if there was magic — even bad magic, and Zach knew it was more likely that there was bad magic than any good kind — then maybe not everyone had to have a story like his father's, a story like the kind all the adults he knew told, one about giving up and growing bitter.

I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.

Nobody ever really sees me the way I am, underneath everything. But she did. She does.

You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.

Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.