And I vaguely remember her smiling at me from the door way the glittering ambiguity of a girls smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question, but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is to simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or does she LIKE me?

Some people have lives; some people have music.

C'mon Pudge. I'm teasing. You have to be tough. I didn't know how bad it was-- and I'm sorry, and they'll regret it-- but you have to be tough.

"Please stop," I said. "You're upsetting the black Santas."

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person.