You just had to know where to look.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It's so easy in the past tense.

"Look," I said, "We knew Jason and Becky would be back, the break would end. This isn't a surprise, it's what's supposed to happen. It's what we wanted. Right?" "Is it?" he asked. "Is it what you want?" Whether he intended it to be or not, this was the final question, the last Truth. If I said what I really thought, I was opening myself up for a hurt bigger than I could even imagine. I didn't have it in me. We changed and altered so many rules, but it was this one, the only one when we'd started, that I would break. "Yes," I said.

Like a blinking cursor on an empty page, it was just the first thing. The beginning of the beginning. But at least it was done.

You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.

My experience is that sequels are rarely as good as the originals.

He doesn’t love me. He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person any more. He’s just a boy. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.