It's fine," I repeated. And whatever. It was fine. It had to be.

You can't just make me different, and then leave. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was just fine with me and last words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

It turns out that, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.

Remember that time in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, when we didn't die?

Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.