“I didn't point out that Courtney and I were hardly BFFs. In Mom's world everyone under the age of eighteen was friends with everyone else, like we were all part of some secret society of minors.”

“No matter how much I may love—scratch that, loved, past tense—Josh, I was no dummy. Everyone knows the Y chromosome carries with it the instinctive urge to lie under pressure.Which, incidentally, was what Josh was going to be under when I found him. Serious pressure.On his larynx.”

“Mom perched on the edge of our sofa, her forehead etched with a line of concern I'd grown to know well. It was the same one she'd flashed at me when I pointed to the twisty slide, the same one she'd pulled out when I'd taken up Tae Kwon Do in third grade, and the same one that had frozen on her features all through driver's ed last spring. It was her SMother face.”

“To say I didn't have great luck in the guy department was like saying Ryan Seacrest didn't have great luck in the height department: total understatement.”

“The first thing I did was run. Okay, actually the first thing I did was scream, lose my balance, flail my arms in the air like some kind of uncoordinated bird, then slide down the side of the tree and land on my butt.Then I ran.”

“Our bodies are our temples. They should have a little more respect for themselves than that.”“You know, I could have sworn I saw you shoveling Cheetos into your temple last week.”“Oh, but I’m pretty sure those were nonfat,” Kaylee piped up.Oh brother.”

“I need to be casual but not too casual. Dressy but not too dressy. I need him to think I just threw on the first thing I found and that I'm not taking this too seriously or overthinking it or even that I was thinking about it at all. Because I'm not. I'm totally not thinking about him, and I don't want him to think I was thinking about him, but I don't want him to think that I'm not thinking about him, because clearly he thought about me enough to ask me out and it would be mean not to be thinking about him at all, so I need just the right amount of thinking, and I'm not sure if that means boots and a skirt or skinny jeans and ballet flats. Help!”