amazingly, i'd actually forgotten that i'm supposed to be plain. i'm so used to alex telling me i'm beautiful. i'm so used to feeling beautiful around him. a hollow opens up in my chest. this is what life will be like without him: everything will become ordinary again. i'll become ordinary again.

i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.

But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?

As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him--his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine.