“Okay,like I could write about being new to this school and feeling really self-conscious already, you know, 'cause I'm new and haven't really gotten my growth spurt yet...in any capacity."This gets a few chuckles and I plow forward."Then,at this meeting, maybe some cool, hot jock is sitting next to me and asks me to stand up, only to have the entire classroom staring at me as I say, 'But I am standing up!' Except,you know, funnier."A few kids giggle and the big guy next to me grunts, "Pretty funny."I smile over at my new comrade and smack his massive shoulder like we're old friends.I'm going to have to get his name."I mean, obviously it'd be better than that. But I just think it'd be good comif relief," I add, doing what my dad calls laying it on thick. "And we could put it near the pet obits to balance out all the high-school-is-depressing-enough vibes!"Now the laughs are easy and everyone's smiling, and I feel myself loosen up a bit. Just like Mom and Dad with cheerleading, these folks are cracking under my spell, and I start really amping up the drama."And I know I couldn't use 'Traumarama' as a title since Seventeen already does, but I'm thinking 'Trauma and Drama-Terrible Tales of Teenagedom,' or something like that, with some real-life gossip mixed in.”

“My therapist told me I need to learn to love myself. It sounds easy enough, but really, how do you just wake up one day and learn that? It feels like something you should just do involuntarily, like swallowing or blinking, but now I have to work on it. It feels so forced. I mean, I know I went to a good school, and people tell me I'm smart and creative, but I don't KNOW that. I don't know how to make myself feel that.”

“Well I want something to do, to create, to achieve, to whatever.... Something I can’t get enough of. You know something that I can't wait to get up in the morning to do something I can't get enough of, something that brings me joy and makes my heart sing. It could be anything, could be more than one thing but something that grabs me. Even a job, if it grabs me so that I could hardly wait to get there. Something that makes me feel good, allows me to be me, gives me freedom to grow and expand, something that grasps my heart, my joy, my excitement and leads me down the path to more joyful things, exciting challenges and challenging things. Barely stopping to take a breath I continued. Need a new journey a new destination, I want to grow to be or become, tread a new path, see what I haven't seen be what I haven't been ask what I haven't asked dare to what I haven't dared to . . . I don't even think it is so much a physical thing or mental it's just sort of un-learning some of what I learned It’s being happy, while I am happy but I want something to do that creates even more. (..)Doing it for the joy of doing it not for any other reason; also I want it from and un-edited creativity free flowing something… I have some things that seem very interesting and somehow just don’t feel right almost like I’m taking the wrong path and yet there are other things that I could be doing like writing but it seems that it does not feel good to sit and write but yet some part of me seems to love it and something in me hates it sort of like it could be the thing for me to do and yet it might not be.”

“You should really, like, dump her and date me instead,' May heard herself saying, all confidence. 'I'm not as irritating. I mean, I'm irritating, but I'm not as bad as she is. And you know me better. Wouldn't that be funny? I mean, we've already hooked up, so we're good.'We broke up,' Pete said quickly. His voice was so bright that May could hear the smile coming through. For a moment she was confused.Who, you and me?'No. Nell and i.'Oh . . .'The meter in her brain clicked once or twice, signaling May that she'd probably said enough.I have to go,' she said suddenly. 'Okay? I think that's great. Cool. Okay. Gotta go now. Hey, Pete, I love you!”

“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”

“It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and than make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit their and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is. And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn't do or what they didn't know. I don't know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It's just different. Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it's okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite.”