“Parker didn’t so much melt against him as he tried to inhabit the same skin Jake was wearing, and Jake wasn’t going to complain about that.”

“He fell in love with a skinny stray cat that would skulk around the dining hall during meals. Every day, Jake would offer it sausage or egg from breakfast and pepperoni or hamburger from lunch. Every day, it ran away from him. But Jake didn’t give up. Even when he had the stomach flu, he snuck out of the infirmary to try to feed it. He was not going to let it down. He would watch it from classroom windows. He even made up a poem about it that he sent home to his mother in a letter. Three months later, the little cat was finally hungry enough to trust him. It never occurred to Jake that the cat...”

“My biggest regret is what I didn’t say… (Jake)”

“Jake's hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.”

“She wasn’t going to lie and she wasn’t going to try to hide Terrible or who he was. She loved him and he was hers, and that made her so proud her chest hurt, and if anybody didn’t like it they could go fuck themselves.”

“Your trouble comes from years of wearing the wrong kind of shoes. - Jake Wexler”