“Ed? Are you alive?’‘Yes..and that’s genuinely surprisingsince your bike went over me abouthalfway down. You’re a very dangerousgirl to date.’'We’re not on a date.”

“I spent the weekend after our date wishing I could stab him with my fluffy-duck pen and staring at the phone hoping he'd call. Dating is a very tricky business.”

“We didn’t have a date. A date ends in akiss, not blood and broken cartilage.”

“She went out with Jacob for five dates, and then they broke up. She came over that night with a tub of ice cream and a bag of Hershey's KISSES. "Comfort food?" I said."If I needed comfort food I'd have brought two tubs of ice cream. I'm nor upset, Luce. This is what I always eat on a Friday night.”

“I look over at Ed. He's staring out the window giving Leo the thumbs-down. I wait till he's looking at me, then I give him two fingers up. He gives me two fingers back. I give him the middle finger. He gives it back to me. I don't know any more signs, so I make up one. Three fingers. Take that, mister. He sticks up four. I call your four and raise you five. He skips straight to ten and does something with his thumb that disturbs me. I bounce my hands on my lap. Ed bounces his lap right back.”

“Right now, I'd be willing to kiss Ed through a bag. So it's true what they say about teenage hormones. It seems I'm raging out of control. It's not very Jane Austen of me but it feels pretty good.The problem is, Ed's acting all Jane Austen on me and he won't stop talking. Shut up, I want to say. All talk and no action is really kind of frustrating.”

“I kept thinking I wouldn't make it to Friday night. That something would happen before then to mess with my luck, something like a nuclear bomb going off so there was nowhere for us to meet."Pretty harsh," Leo said when I called him to come get me because she'd left me in the gutter with a broken nose. She never even called to check she hadn't killed me. A date like that makes a guy wish they would drop the bomb. Right over his house.”