And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry.

I don't know where to go. I don't know what comes now." "Don't worry," Will said. "We'll figure something out." Liesl managed to smile at him. She liked that word: *we*. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down.