When he speaks again, I can tell that he's smiling. "So I guess we saved each other.

Do the other kids make fun of you? For how you talk?' 'Sometimes.' 'So why don't you do something about it? You could learn to talk differently, you know.' But this is my voice. How would you be able to tell when I was talking?

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.

Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie

People are like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remai ned invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.