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.

When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.

If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have." He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly." "Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing. "City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

That's when you really lose people, you know.When the pain passes.

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