“I wasn't crying for myself. I was crying for the innocents.”

“My heart was in a perpetual state of sadness and the only relief I could find were in those cathartic cries. I lived a fragile existence.”

“And what’s wrong with innocence, anyway? Huh? I don’t get it. I grew up with no innocence. None. From day one, I was contaminated with the ‘real world’ and you know what? It sucked. It royally sucked." - Harper Bailey, Callum & Harper”

“Tie Dye Tom, my closes friend next to Cherry, say next to her crying like a little baby. 'I feel like a mama bird,' he said through choking sobs that made me laugh out loud.”

“What I needed was to love myself, to want to keep myself around.”

“Men wanted me. They all did, however briefly, but none of them wanted to keep me. That's what I needed. I needed to be owned, loved. BUT NOT BY A MAN. I knew then that I never needed to be kept by a man. What I needed was to love myself, to want to keep myself around. And in that revelation, I knew that if I wanted to keep myself, that a man wanting to keep me would just be a by-product.”

“I gave myself no boundaries. If I wanted to sleep with a boy, I did. If I wanted to try a drug, I did. If I wanted to drink to the point of excess.”