“Oh. My. God. I'd been dissed. Majorly. Because I was an ugly, disgusting ogre. Snot was probably pouring from my nostrils onto the ground.”

“In fact, I noticed everything about Alex. Like that his left nostril was slightly larger than his right nostril. And the way he ate a Kit Kat bar: chocolate first and then the layers of wafer separately. I could pick his one sneeze in a room full of sneezers.”

“I wanted to turn away but I was trapped in that spot--in that moment--by those moon eyes. Because even though I couldn't see them, I could feel them looking at me and they burned me so badly that my legs didn't work.”

“Look, haven't you ever heard that musicians play from the heart? Well, I can't be expected to play in California when my heart's over two thousand miles away.”

“Then I wake up. And, it's not the purple- hued light of the house at three in the morning that has woken me, or the sound of Payton stumbling into the bathroom. It's a hand. A single hand. So innocuous. I feel it before my eyes blink open. A slight weight on my hip. A current of electricity running through me, reshaping the air that I breathe. It takes only a second for me to process what it is, to rearrange the spaces in my head around the feel of his fingers on my body.”

“You know, I never should have let you not be my friend. It's not healthy for either of us.”

“My pulse is buzzing and my stomach is a riot of butterflies and half-digested peanut butter cookies.”