It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered--so many locks not enough keys.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

It’s the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.

I'm sorry," I heard him say again. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden blur of movement as he slid out of his seat, left some bills for the breakfast he wouldn't eat, and walked away. And as he did, I thought again of those mornings in the hallway at school, way back in ninth grade. Everything had started in such sharp detail, each aspect pronounced and clear. Obviously, endings were different. Harder to see, full of shapes that could be one thing or another, with all the things that you were once so sure of suddenly not familiar, if they were even recognizable at all.

I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away.

Sometimes, you get things right the first time. Others, the second. But the third time, they say, is the charm.

Look at it this way: I might be saying you're fat, but at least I'm not punching you in the face.' Are those the only options?' Not always. Just sometimes.