“She hates the fact that she won't know. It's feels like the last day of school, the final night at summer camp, like everything is coming to an abrupt and dizzying end.”

“and she's a nurse. do you know how hard nursing school is? it's like medical school. so she's obviously smart.”

“feeling a bit like cinderella, she made it home at two minutes past one last night.”

“And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.”

“And she couldn't help but smile at the irony of the fact that the baddest boy in school could somehow always make her feel like the world was good.”

“It's so weird," Chloe said finally, "that it doesn't feel different now." "What?" I asked her. "Everything," she said. "I mean, this is what we've been waiting for, right? High school's over. It's a whole new thing but it feels exactly the same." "That's because nothing new has started yet," Jess told her. She had her face tipped up, eyes on the sky above us. "By the end of the summer, then things will feel new. Because they will be." Chloe pulled another tiny bottle—this time gin—out of her jacket pocket and popped the top. "It sucks to wait, though," she said, taking a sip of it. "I mean, for everything to begin.”