but sometimes one person can hold you up in life, keep you standing, and without that hand to hold, you can find yourself free-falling no matter how strong you used to be, no matter how hard you try to remain steady.

Girls like you can't understand," Julia said, and it was true. Ellie had been popular. She didn't know that some hurts were like a once-broken bone. In the right weather, they could ache for a lifetime.

I am such a Pacific Northwest girl.

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.

That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.

Alice started to cry. It came with no sound, no shuddering, no childlike hysterics, just a soul-deep release that turned into moisture and dripped down her puffy pink cheeks. She touched her tears, frowning. Then she looked up at Julia and whimpered two words before she fell asleep. ‘Real hurts.’