No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

That’s just the kind of thing that kids do to each other. It’s no big deal. There’s always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

I’m sorry,” he repeats again, too low for Raven and Tack to hear. “I’m sorry for everything.

Maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

He looked at me like I was beautiful.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.