“Chicken,' Josie said. 'Have you ever been in love?'Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think so.”

“What does it feel like?” he asked.“What does what feel like?”Peter thought for a moment. “Being at the top.”Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three ofthese, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. “Like if you takeone wrong step,” she said, “you’re going to fall.”

“Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuousroom, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but itwas also a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn’twant to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.”

“Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fellapart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child-not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day,expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love,mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?”

“Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex couldreally see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn’t so much the shape of the face but the shine ofit; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount ofexpensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling inlove did to a person.Could you be jealous of your own child?”

“I am Alice in Wonderland', Josie thought. 'Watch me fall.”

“[Josie said] "I just ... I don't like the way you treat kids who aren't like us, all right? Just because you don't want to hang out with losers doesn't mean you have to torture them, does it?" "Yeah, it does," Matt said. "Because if there isn't a them, there can't be an us." His eyes narrowed. "You should know that better than anyone.”