Claire LaZebnik

“He smiled down into her eyes and she looked right at him and she knew him. When hadn’t she known him? With a little sigh of acceptance, she moved into his arms, meeting his eager kiss with a mouth that was just as greedy as him”

“..."And then we played Ping-Pong—”“Not pool? I always assumed he was a billiards man—I mean, it’s so handy the way he keeps a stick up his—”

“Basically, the world is a giant shithole. But some of us are capable of imagining something better.”

“I was isolated but not ostracized, ignored but not abused.”

“[Ava] had always thought the main relationship in the family was the one between Nancy and her daughters. To have a family, you needed a father, of course, and Jimmy had played that role perfectly well, if you were okay with an old-fashioned interpretation of the job. But the Nickerson family was all about the women and their noisy, bickering, gossiping, interfering relationships with one another.And now it seemed that maybe she ahd been looking at it all wrong. Maybe she and Lauren were just the icing, and the basic, underlying cake of the family was the couple in front of her who had a shared history she knew very little about.”

“Every guy seems nice until he’s not.”

“I cursed myself not only for forgetting to turn my phone off but for ever thinking that having a rock music ringtone was cool.”

“Man, I hated not being able to figure someone out.And from the slightly uncertain look he gave me as we all went to class, I suspected he felt the same way.”

“I got lost in him, and it was the kind of lost that's exactly like being found.”

“No one's family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.”

“You wouldn't think the touch of someone's hand could blow your mind. It's nothing, right? People don't right songs and poems about holding hands - they write them about kisses and sex and eternal love. I mean, when you're a little kid you hold hands with your parents to cross the street. Who's going to write an ode to that?We were alone in the dark, even though the enormous theater was filled with probably a thousand people. We were a tiny island in a sea of other people who didn't matter, who had no meaning, who were so stupid, so oblivious, so stuck in their own boring lives that they didn't even notice the huge, momentous, life-shattering event that was taking place right there in row L, between seats 102 and 104.Derek Edwards was holding my hand.”

“And Derek was... what?A pair of dark eyes that hid more than they revealed and some broad shoulders and a mouth that could be cold and thin and then suddenly widen into a generous grin just when you thought such a thing was impossible.”

“He only invited me because of you and Chase.''Right,' she said, following me inside. 'He's never shown the slightest interest in you before. I mean, he's never stared at you like you're the only person in the room when we're all together. Or sulked around for days because you turned him down for a dance. Or touched the sleeve of your sweater when he thinks no one's looking-''He's never done any of that,' I said. Then, less confidently, 'Has he?”

“He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).”

“Everyone at Coral Tree Prep was good-looking. Really. Everyone. I didn't see a single fat or ugly kid all morning. Maybe they just locked them up at registration and didn't let them out again until graduation.”

“Juliana's a year older than me, but she sometimes seems younger - mostly because she's the opposite of cynical and I'm the opposite of the opposite of cynical.”

“I want a tutor,” Layla said. “It would make doing homework so much easier.”“Me too,” said Kaitlyn. “If Layla gets one, I get one.”“No daughter of mine will ever have a tutor,” Dad said.“What if we’re failing a course?” asked Layla.His graying eyebrows drew together. “If you fail a single course, young lady, we will pull you out of school and get you a job scrubbing toilets for the rest of your life.”

“He can’t ground her if he’s already killed her,” I pointed out when Juliana quoted this to me. “Well, he can, but it wouldn’t have the same impact.”