Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.

I'm not sure what it is that I want, but I feel it deep in the pit of my stomach. It's there sitting dormant. I'll know it when I see it.

It’s like, you know, it doesn’t matter what you do, even if you try to replicate an experience down to every last detail, it’ll never be the way it was when it happened naturally the first time.

A bus ride is like being in another world.

Victor Faust did much more than help me escape a life of abuse and servitude. He changed me. He changed the landscape of my dreams, the dreams I had every day about living ordinarily and free and on my own. He changed the colors on the palette from primary to rainbow—as dark as the colors of that rainbow may be.

I tried to will them with my super mental powers so he’d put them around my waist, but apparently I had no super mental powers.

I think it was the one thing I didn’t like about him or about guys in general: when a girl says she doesn’t want to talk about it, the truth is that she usually does. I wanted him to pry it out of me. Of course, I would’ve pretended to be a little angry that he didn’t just leave me alone, but eventually I would’ve told him, when I was tired of pretending.