“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 used the word "beautiful" to describe another boy. I knew how it must have sounded to her. I also knew that it was exactly what I'd meant, exactly what I did not want to mean.”

“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.”

“In a moment like this, there were so many beautiful and uncommon things worth saying. Aidan would have said them all, stealing this spectacle from the men who'd paid for it, making it her own.”