Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

One word," Ted replied, dead serious, "can change the whole world." There was a moment while we all considered this. Finally Lissa said to Chloe, loud enough for all of us to hear (she'd had a minibottle or two herself), "I bet he did really well on his SATs.

Like so many before them, they didn't care that my dad was only the messenger. They still wanted to shoot him.

I was tired of hanging on, taking the torn pieces to make something whole with them.

So finally, I decided that the best response — the safest — was none at all.

In my group of friends, I was always the one who remembered everything. The stories, the boys my friends and I dated, all the details. So I think a part of me was always filing them away, although at the time I wasn't sure why.

It wasn’t so much that I was positive. I just wasn’t fully subscribing to such a negative way of thinking anymore.