“I wondered if this was the way old crushes died, with a whimper, slowly, and then, just like that—gone.”

“I could survive for months, years, on a crush. It was like food. It could sustain me.”

“Do you like Cam?” the girl asked me casually. I wondered how she knew him—I thought he’d been a nobody just like me.“I barely even know him,” I told her, and her face relaxed. She was relieved. I recognized that look in her eyes—dreamy and hopeful. It must have been the way I looked when I used to talk about Conrad, used to try to think of ways to insert his name into conversation. It made me sad for her, for me.”

“It was like coming home after you'd been gone a long, long time. It held a million promises of summer and of what just might be.”

“When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?”

“And then I had a thought, clear as day. I would never be somebody's favorite again. I would never be a kid again, not in the same way. That was all over now. She was really gone.”

“Gone had come to mean something different, in a way that is hadn’t used to. Something permanent.”