“A radiant glow enveloped Alaura. Soft eruptions of various shades of effervescent green danced in the air and frolicked in the locks of her dark blonde hair. Whispers of yellows and blues revealed themselves near the skin, kissing the air with each leap.”

“I won’t have you calling me Miss Tuttle. That’s what the doc calls me. And the lady at the bank. One takes my temperature and the other my money. Friends don’t take anything—they give.”

“I don’t know what to say,” he breathed into her hair, squeezing the air from her. “Fuck. Just wait for me.”That was all he needed to say. “I will.”

“Kissed me like he was a man starving for oxygen and I was the only air he needed to breathe.”

“No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.”

“What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.”

“All right," Shannen says slowly, tucking a lock of dark brown hair behind her ear. "Why did you glue that dolphin upside down?" Okay, so I'm a little distracted. "He's doing the back stroke.”