“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.”

“In the pool, on that last night of the last summer, we said we’d always come back. It’s scary how easy promises were broken. Just like that.”

“For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers.”

“i worried he'd let go, but he didn't. We held hands like this the whole rest of the way home.”

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

“It was a summer I would never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was.”

“There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you'd erase yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.”