...You deserve to be happy. What can I do?" Don't send me away, I thought. He looked at me again. "What do you want?" "I want to taste an apple," I said. And your lips, I thought.

To desperately hope," I whispered James let out a breath. "To gratefully believe.

Those who cry to be young again should think twice before they seal those prayers.

Your mind will never lose anything forever that's worth keeping.

I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.

The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.

Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsly attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated.