“[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.”

“You keep distracting me,” I tell her.“All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!”“Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.j”

“You did really great up there,” I tell her, because I don’t know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you every day. That maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”

“I sigh. “But if you’d talked to Jules—if she could hear you . . .” My voice trails off.“Then you wouldn’t feel quite so crazy?” Oliver asks gently. “Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?”

“A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.”

“Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”

“Stupid English.""English isn't stupid," I say."Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me.""Why not?""He says lunch isn't a subject."I glance at him. "It isn't.""Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?”