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

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

That sucks, though," Wes said finally, his voice low. "You're just setting yourself up to fail, because you'll never get everything perfect." "Says who?" He just looked at me. "The world," he said, gesturing all around us, as if this party, this deck encompassed it all. "The universe. There's just no way. And why would you want everything to be perfect, anyway?" "I don't want everything to be perfect," I said. Just me, I thought. Somehow. "I just want—

Life isn't fair," Owen told her. "Get used to it.

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

My point is, there are a lot of people in the world. No one ever sees everything the same way you do; it just doesn't happen. So when you find one person who gets a couple of things, especially if they're important ones... you might as well hold on to them. You know?

Even if you couldn't see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow.