I hear laughter and someone asks if I need help, not in a nice way. I snarl, "What I need is for your mother to have thought a little harder nine months before your birthday.

Are there any other missing persons living under your roof? Elvis? Jimmy Hoffa? Amelia Earhart? I'd just like full disclosure now, before we go any further.

I wasn’t sure if I was charmed by his reluctance to share a bed with a girl or insulted that, apparently, I wasn’t hot enough for him to charge the mattress like a bull.

And there is the girl. When I first see her and her dun mare from my vantage point on the cliff road, I am struck first not by the fact that she is a girl, but by the fact that she's in the ocean. it's the dreaded second day, the day people start to die, and no one will get close to the surf. But there she is, trotting up to the knee in the water. Fearless.

It's like how on certain days some people wear sweaters when other people can wear t-shirts and still feel comfortable - different reactions to the same temperature.

She doesn't know any better, what a girl like her needs is a man with both his legs on the land. A man who will hold her down so that she doesn't fly away. She doesn't know yet that someone like you looks better on the shelf than in your hand.

and i am a boy waiting-for the heat and fruitfulness of summer,waiting to see who will walk out of those woods for me. Waiting for my lovely summer girl