“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“My mother had once told Riegel and me this story about a friend of hers who lived in Newport. "Poor Celia," she'd said. "She lost two of her houses to hurricanes. Still has the farm in Rhinebeck, and it's a lucky thing that she has the ranch in Jackson Hole and her home on Jupiter Island. Otherwise, I just don't know what she would do." Riegel and I both dropped to our knees with laughter. The phrase "Poor Celia" became code for us. A shorthand for outrageous privilege.”

“Cal and I had both predicted that Brizzey would marry young, divorce, then elope with some European slob with a fake title. She was doomed to run around Greenwich, forcing everyone to call her "the Duchess.”