My boyfriend's an idiot," I say as soon as he lurches away."A cute idiot," Ally corrects me."That's like saying 'a cute mutant.' Doesn't exist.

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

There were days I asked for it-prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you-the hope for it-was the only thing that kept me going.

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

They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all. But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.