Sarah Dessen

“So much hanging on just these things, tiny increments that together build a life. Like words build a story, and what had Ted said? One word can change the entire world”

“Maybe, you just misplaced it, you know? It's been there. But you just haven't been looking in the right spot. Because lost means forever, it's gone. But misplaced... that means it's still around, somewhere. Just not where you thought.”

“Times like this it did seem real I was leaving, and even more that my family, and this life, would go on without me. And again I felt that emptiness rise up, but pushed it away. Still, I lingered there, in the doorway, memorizing the noise. The moment. Tucking it away out of sight, to be remembered when I needed it most.”

“But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.”

“Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.”

“I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.”

“I should have told you from the start. I will let you down.”

“So," she went on, "it got me thinking about what cost beauty. Or for that matter, what cost anything? Would you trade love for beauty? Or happiness for beauty? Could a gorgeous person with a mean streak be a worthy trade? And if you did make the trade, decide you'd take that beautiful swan and hope it wouldn't turn on you, what would you do if it did?”

“I planned my whole future around Adam," she said now, quietly. "And now I have nothing." "No," I told her, "now you just don't have Adam. There's a big difference, Lissa. You just can't see it yet.”

“As if at the age of eighteen life already sucked beyond any hope of improvement.”

“I'd seen another shade of him, and if it had been light where we were now, he'd have seen the same of me. So I was grateful, as I had been so often in my life, for the dark.”

“As if he was beating me to the punch, his words living forever, while I was left speechless, no rebuttal, no words left to say.”

“It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.”

“One word," Ted replied, dead serious, "can change the whole world." There was a moment while we all considered this. Finally Lissa said to Chloe, loud enough for all of us to hear (she'd had a minibottle or two herself), "I bet he did really well on his SATs.”

“Once, I was easy. Now, I was choosy. See? Big difference.”

“Her life was perfect. But as was often the case, the rest of us were still adjusting.”

“I didn't trot my pain out to show around. I kept it better hidden than anyone. I did.”

“n the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.”

“In a way, I was almost happy to see her. The worst part of me, out in the flesh. Blinking back at me in the dim light, daring me to call her a name other than my own.”

“It passed, though. That was the bad thing. It always passed.”

“But I always worked harder when I was up against something, or when someone assumed I couldn't succeed. That's what drove me, all those nights studying. The fact that so many figured I couldn't do it.”

“The lizard stared up at us, and we stared back, taking each other in. He was little and defenseless, I felt sorry for him already. This was a screwed-up place he'd just come into. But he didn't have to know that. Not yet, anyway. There in that room, where it was hot and cramped, the world probably still seemed small enough to manage.”

“I eased back on my elbows, tilting my head back to look up at the sky, which was pinkish, streaked with red. This was the time we knew best, that stretch of day going from dusk to dark. It seemed like we were always waiting for nighttime here. I could feel the trampoline easing up and down, moved by our own breathing, bringing us in small increments up and back from the sky as the colors faded, slowly, and the stars began to show themselves.”

“That was the nice thing about the Spot: you could hear everything, but no one could see you.”

“It's so weird," Chloe said finally, "that it doesn't feel different now." "What?" I asked her. "Everything," she said. "I mean, this is what we've been waiting for, right? High school's over. It's a whole new thing but it feels exactly the same." "That's because nothing new has started yet," Jess told her. She had her face tipped up, eyes on the sky above us. "By the end of the summer, then things will feel new. Because they will be." Chloe pulled another tiny bottle—this time gin—out of her jacket pocket and popped the top. "It sucks to wait, though," she said, taking a sip of it. "I mean, for everything to begin.”

“Yes, it sucked getting dumped. But wasn't it better to just be brutally honest? To admit that your feeling for someone is never going to be powerful enough to justify taking up any more of their time? I was doing him a favor, really. Freeing him up for a better opportunity. In fact, I was a practically a saint, if you really thought about it. Exactly.”

“He's getting dumped. And he doesn't even know it yet. He's probably eating a cheeseburger or flossing or picking up his dry cleaning, and he has no idea. No inkling.”

“So what do you wear to dump somebody?" she asked me, twirling a lock of hair around one finger. "Black, for mourning? Or something cheerful and colorful, to distract them from their pain? Or maybe you wear some sort of camouflage, something that will help you disappear quickly in case they don't take it well.”

“Just me and the future, finally together. Now there was a happy ending I could believe in.”

“closed my eyes and listened. It was like music I'd heard all my life, even more than "This Lullaby." All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.”

“If nothing else, now we knew where to find each other, even if only time would tell if either of us would ever come looking.”

“I hoped this was true. Even if it wasn‟t, all I could do was hand over what I could, with the hope of something in return. But of course, this was easier said than done.”

“Even if you do make tons of new friends,” I told him, “try not to forget where you came from, okay?”

“How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you? I had no idea. More than ever, though, right then I had to believe the answer would just come to me.”

“If this was my instinct talking, I didn‟t want to hear what it was saying.”

“But the original was there as well—more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic. It fit not just the yellow house but another door, deep within my own heart. One that had been locked so tight for so long that I was afraid to even try it for fear of what might be on the other side”

“Nothing‟s going to change, Jamie had said that day, but I‟d known even then this wasn‟t true. My mother had always been the point that I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well. These months she‟d been gone, I felt like I‟d been floating, loose and boundaryless, but now that I knew where she was, I kept waiting for a kind of certainty to kick in. It didn‟t. Instead, I was more unsure than ever, stuck between this new life and the one I‟d left behind”

“Maybe I'd just figured out there were some things you were better off not knowing”

“There were so many levels to the unknown, from safe to dangerous to outright nebulous, scariest of all.”

“Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”

“There's something nice about the silence of a car ride in the dark, going home. When you were tired of the radio and conversation, and it was okay to just be alone with your thoughts and the road ahead. If you're that comfortable with someone, you don't have to talk.”

“It was amazing how you could get so far from where you'd planned, and yet find it was exactly were you needed to be.”

“If only you could really use a fail-proof system to know who was worth keeping and who needed to be thrown away. It would make it so much easier to move through the world, picking and choosing what connections to make, or whether to make any at all.”

“Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.”

“You want me to give her a key?" the guy asked."I want you to give her a possibility," she told him, looking at my necklace again. "And that's what a key represents. An open door, a chance. You know?”

“A ver, ¿qué hay que ponerse para cortar con alguien? ¿Negro, de luto? ¿O algo colorido y alegre, para distraerlos de su dolor? ¿O mejor algo de camuflaje, que te ayude a desaparecer rápidamente en caso de que no se lo tomen bien?”

“Incluso ahora que estaba muerto, era un artista de un solo éxito.O dos, supongo, si me cuento a mí.”

“These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.”