Maybe, you just misplaced it, you know? It's been there. But you just haven't been looking in the right spot. Because lost means forever, it's gone. But misplaced... that means it's still around, somewhere. Just not where you thought.

Teenagers are a great audience and they are fearless about asking what they want to know.

The kind who live for music and are constantly seeking it out, anywhere they can. Who can't imagine a life without it. They're enlightened.

Maybe it was true, and being a girl could be about interest rates and skinny jeans, riding bikes and wearing pink. Not about any one thing, but everything.

She was so emotional, on the verge of tears. This was what I'd wanted to prevent with all those quick disappearances, the tangledness of farewells and all the baggage they brought with them. But now, looking at Deb, I realized what else I'd given up: knowing for sure that someone was going to miss me. What happened to goodbye, Michael in Westcott had written on my Ume.com page. I was pretty sure I knew, now. It had been packed away in a box of its own, trying to be forgotten, until I really needed it. Until now.

Maybe that's what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.

Just because someone's pretty, doesn't mean she's decent.