If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.

He was still in love with you, anyway.

If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color--the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness--but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood.