This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.

Why couldn't you let me have it? Why did you have to take it? Why did you always take everything?

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong. That's not totally true...I know I belong with Alex.

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)