Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore.

Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.

And the more you love someone, the safer it is to be mad at them. Love can handle mad, no problem.

She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.

He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.' I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?' 'Inside.' It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.

Where were we?" she said. "Getting credit," I said. "What about it?" "Well, it's nice to get credit." The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said.

This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.