“Bellingham Academy: everything you always wanted in a prep school and less.”

“Everyone at Bellingham would know me, know who I was, by dinner. Would they consider me the hero or the fuckup? All I had wanted was to be anonymous.”

“Aidan had compared Bellingham to the Island of Misfit Toys, a sanctuary for the unwanted. But the problem, as I saw it, was that putting this many defective kids together only created more trouble.”

“As much as she admired our ancestors' wealth, it bothered Mom that Riegel was so consumed by making money. "Your brother knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“It wasn't that Ginger had messed me up. I realized that most guys would have been grateful. But she had taken some not small thing from me. Nadia was fifteen and she wanted to have sex. I wanted to do her this favor. Hoped that I wouldn't mess her up for life. We were all pretending we knew what we wanted to do with our bodies.”

“I don't know why I said what I did. Maybe I wanted Hannah to remember something, or maybe I wanted to test her, but when she asked me my name I didn't even pause. "My name is Aidan," I said. "It means fire.”

“I'd thought of her with unblinking eyes, moving always, across the pages of opened books with rapid precision, but as she stood in front of me, her eyes looked slow and watery. I capsized into them.”