We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals....It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.