I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially-fraught free throws.

It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don’t care if that mark is a scar.

My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended - if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

She was not an adventure, she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.