“Bubble-gum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the books spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.”

“Magnus had a list of favored traits in a partner-black hair, blue eyes, honest...”

“Piper had a new entry in her top-ten list of Times Piper Felt Useless. Fighting Shrimpzilla with a dagger and a pretty voice? Not so effective.”

“I wish I had eyes that changed colors from blue to gray, and then after I cried, to all the colors of the rainbow, because then I’d just sit in front of the mirror writing poems that alternated between extremely sad poems, to poems about light refraction and blinking promises.”

“They were ticking off items on a to-do list that was magnet-attached to the fridge. There were nineteen items on the list. They'd crossed off fifteen. The final item was underlined: Make a life.”

“Adele was in everybody’s wish list, and her list of Romeos was nearly as long as the Yellow Pages. Some witty person had suggested that her family needed a system of traffic lights to avoid fatal crashes for the men in her life.”