I was actually kind of a hot mess in high school. I did a lot of things in high school I'm not proud of. I wasn't a good student and I wasn't particularly a good daughter. I wasn't very engaged.

Because maybe, the best of times were yet to come. You never knew.

If he'd been any other boy, and this was any other world, I would have kissed him. Nothing could have stopped me.

A lot can change between planning something and actually doing it. But maybe all that really matters is that anything is different at all.

We didn't talk about our scars, the ones you could see and the ones you couldn't.

I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real.

I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn’t come easy for, someone like me.