She leaned into my shoulder. "Maybe you don't have to be a Caster to have power." I pushed her hair behind her ear. "Maybe you just have to fall for one.

The toes of our ratty black sneakers touched.

surrounded by strangers who love me (un)strangers made strange by pain

Maybe it needed to be broken. Sometimes things have to break before you can fix them.

I stared at the creased map on my wall, the thin green line connecting all the places I had read about. There they were, all the cities of my imaginary future, held together with tape and marker and pins. In six months, a lot had changed. There was no thin green line that could lead me to my future anymore. Just a girl.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” “Elton John?” “Close. Ernest Hemingway. In his own way, sort of the rock star of his time.

Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, while everyone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a bad bale of cotton.Read