I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting

I was here for a reason. There was something I was meant not simply to be, but to do- and it wasn't to run or hide or give up the minute things seemed terrifying and impossible.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

My portal to another world was fiction.

If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

I just like that balance of the real and the fantastical because as a reader and consumer of stories and fantasy, I always want to feel like I can find that world.

When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.