I think when you're a beginning author with any publishing company, there's only so much they can put behind you.

It wasn't until Kiffney-Brown, when I met Jason Talbot, that I really thought I might actually have one of those boyfriend kind of stories to tell the next time I got together with my old friends. Jason was smart, good-looking, and seriously on the rebound after his girlfriend at Jackson dumped him for, in his words, 'a juvenile delinquent welder with a tattoo'.

So this had been all I wanted, a boy who understood how I felt. Now, though, I sometimes wished for more.

I'm starting to think, though, that some things never get that. The replay, and all. So at some point you have to make peace with it as it is, not keep waiting for a chance to change it

I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself fo the next hit, and fel something. Something grainy and samll, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park. Oh Cass, I thought. I miss you so, so much.

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.

But she wouldn't. I knew that already. My mother and I had an understanding: we worked together to be as much in control of our shared world as possible. I was suposed to be her other half, carrying my share of the weight. In the last few weeks, I'd tried to shed it, and doing so sent everything off kilter. So of course she would pull me tighter, keeping me in my place, because doing so meant she would always be sure, somehow, of her own.