That’s just the kind of thing that kids do to each other. It’s no big deal. There’s always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

The idea—the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.

It occurs to me that for a long time she has been doing her own version of resisting.

My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.