Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color--the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness--but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood.

This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates.

They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.

We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

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

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

I don't know how i stay on my feet, why i don;t just shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when i want it so badly to stop