It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

You must hurt, or be hurt.