“Go see old virgins! Now ask a strange boy out, you shy, Retarded thing!”

“Stuart, who had just witnessed me go through an entire rainbow of emotions and experiences. There was parents-have-just-been-jailed me, stuck-in-a-strange-town me, insane-and-can't-shut-up me, kind-of-snarky-to-the-strange-guy-trying-to-be-helpful me, breakup me, and the extremely popular jump-on-top-of-you-unexpectedly me.”

“Listen, haircut...'Did you just call me haircut?' he asked.Yes. You know there's no reason we can't go online. It's crazy.'Why'd you call me haircut?' he asked, touching his hair. 'Is it because I have a great haircut?'You figure it out,' she answered.-Clio and Aiden, Girl At Sea by Maureen Johnson”

“You want to go back to my house the long way?" he asked."Or the shortcut? You have to be cold-""Long way," I replied. "The long way, for sure.”

“One thing," I said, when we had broken apart and the swirling feeling in my head subsided. "Maybe...don't tell your mom too much about this. I think she has ideas." "What?" he asked, all innocence, as he put an arm around my shoulders and led me back toward his house. "Don't your parents cheer and stare when you make out with someone? Is that weird where you come from? I guess they don't get to see it much, though. From jail, I mean." "Shut it, Weintraub. If I knock you down in the snow, these kids will swarm and eat you.”

“The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up.There was a thing in it.The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand...but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid.A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door, and gone.”

“Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.”