It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love.

Are you an idiot, or an idiot?' Gargarin hissed. 'The first one. I really resent being called the second.

We were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors," she told him once. "I was paper and she was rock so I lived and she died.

The next night he asked Jonah if he could take $9.49 out of Jonah's secret stash that only Danny and his mum and Jack knew about. Jonah kept it in his sock drawer next to a photograph of Jonah and a girl with sad eyes, taken in one of those railway station photo booths.

For reasons he couldn’t understand a sadness came over him and it was then he saw the girl standing on the other side of the dirt road, her eyes pools of absolute sorrow, her light brown hair glowing in the splinters of sunlight that forced their way through the trees.

I've been waiting for you all night and day,' she said. Froi shivered. He realised that the words came from Quintana the ice maiden. Realised, as he felt his face heating up, that the idea of this Quintana waiting for him with excitement spoke to parts of him he believed to be dormant. And then she winked. 'Did I do that right?' she asked. Her smile was lopsided and he saw a glimpse of the teeth. And Froi imagined that he would follow her to the ends of the earth.

Do you love me?’ he asked instead. ‘Because if you don’t, I’d wait until you did. I’d wait weeks and months and years.