Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

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.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don't come.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.