I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Wondering what I’d think of that girl, if I was someone else, seeing how easily she sits in her boyfriend’s lap, laughing, with his arms around her. I would have thought her life was perfect, the way I once thought Cass’s was. It was too easy, I was learning, to just assume things.

Now, see," Wes said, nodding at my plate, "this is going to blow your mind." I looked at him. "It's a waffle, not the second coming.

Like it takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening.

I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.

With total strangers, it had always been my policy to expect the worst. Usually they-and those that you knew best, for that matter-did not disappoint.

As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship.