“Nothing, nothing felt better than the way sand felt beneath my feet. It was both solid and shifting. Constant and ever-changing. It was summer.”

“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.”

“I whispered “I’m not,” even though I was. Not scared of him, but scared of everything I felt. Sometimes it was too much. What I felt for him was bigger than the world, than anything.”

“He started to say something, maybe an apology and maybe not, and then he stopped, he leaned over and pulled me toward him - like by gravitational force. He kissed me, hard, and his skin was stubbly and rough against my cheek. My first thought was, I guess he didn't have time to shave this morning, and then - I was kissing him back, my fingers winding through his soft yellow hair and my eyes closed. He kissed like he was drowning and I was air. It was passionate, and desperate, and like nothing I had ever experienced before.This was what people meant when they said the earth stopped turning. It felt like a world outside of that car, that moment, didn't exist. It was just us.”

“It wasn’t was easy as picking one over the other. Nothing ever was. It wasn’t as though I’d even had a choice, not really.”

“Everything in my room was old and faded, but I loved that about it. It felt like there might be secrets in the walls, in the four-poster bed, especially in that music box.”

“I’ve only ever loved two boys—both of them with the last name Fisher. Conrad was first, and I loved him in a way that you can really only do the first time around. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t know better and doesn’t want to—it’s dizzy and foolish and fierce. That kind of love is really a one-time-only thing.”