She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.

Freak the ferocious out.

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -

Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about." "Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.

It's not fair. It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.