“Mouth guard. And I think we'll start you in goal."Goal sounded like a special job. I didn't want a special job, unless that special job involved sitting on the side under a pile of blankets.”

“Well, what now? You have no job. I have no job. Wanna play Jenga?”

“It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.”

“The day was ridiculous.In fact, the situation was so serious I thought they had to be joking - like maybe they staged a special first day to psych people out. I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths." It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”

“It was very pretty. It also made Marlene look very demure, which she probably hated. Ideally, Marlene probably wanted an outfit that had a special holder for a gun.”

“A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those are two very different things. For the first one, that you want to write a book, I think is an excellent idea and you should totally do that because teenagers who want to write, you should be writing. You should be writing all the time like a maniac. Don't worry about the second bit, just yet because A. You need a lot of practice. You need to do it for, I'm not kidding, years. And then once you are published, it's a business. It's a job. Plus, every author I know was that teenager who sat in their room and read and wrote. That's who becomes an author, but that's what you have to do for a while before you become an author.”

“Have some nice hot chocolate, something to eat, cuddle up under a blanket..." Under any other circumstances, I would have assumed that that last sentence meant, "Cuddle up under two separate blankets, spaced several feet apart, possibly with a lightly chained wolf between you," because that's what parents always mean.”