She smiled, and her eyes started to drift downward. "Cather..." Back up to his eyes. "You know that I'm falling in love with you, right?

October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!

He looked exactly like a rat. Like the human being version of a rat. Like the villain in a Don Bluth movie.

"What about him?" she’d say, finding an attractive guy to point out while they were standing in the lunch line. "Do you want to kiss him?" "I don’t want to kiss a stranger," Cath would answer. "I’m not interested in lips out of context."

The squirrels on campus were beyond domestic; they were practically domestically abusive.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I was in my mid 20s when email finally took off. Until then, the phone was my primary way of connecting with the people in my life.