He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn;t your fairytale prince charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes,but i liked him best when that stuff fell away.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep... Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

All the things paper-thin and paper-frail, and all the people too.

I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable." Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

I am concussed," I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.

One of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.