Tuesday—we had school for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.

You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.

It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.