“I don't know why, but I didn't want her to call me Dick anymore. It was feeling kind of fake. 'Maybe we should use our real names outside of class. Yours is Rosetta, right?''Yes. Rosetta Vaughn.''All right,' I said. 'Well, mine is - ''Seth McCoy. I know.' She kind of wrapped her arms around herself like she was getting cold. 'I've known since February fourteenth, actually.'She's memorized the date she found out my name? What the hell?She laughed. 'Don't freak out! I only remember because it was Valentine's Day.'As if that explained it. 'And why do you remember learning my name on Valentine's Day?''Kendall Eckman was running after you in the hall screaming, "Seth McCoy, if you don't buy a rose from me, I'll kill you!" She was doing that Valentine's drama club fundraiser. Remember?''Actually, yes.'What I remembered was getting stoned with Isaac before school, and Kendall harshing my mellow the minute we walked in the door.Rosetta was looking like there was more to this story. 'And after she kept asking, you bought a red one?''Right. And I passed it off to -' I'd been about to say 'some chick,' but with how intently she was watching me, I was getting a different idea. '-you, right?'She extended her arm to pass me an imaginary rose in the same way I must have handed her a real one. Then she imitated the corny voice I must have used. 'Here, beautiful. Have a wonderful Valentine's Day.'Oh, Christ. The stupid shit I said sometimes.”

“What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.'What do you do?''What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?''Why not?'She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.'Because... I don't know,' she sighs.I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.”

“I love my passengers. I remember one woman in particular--a senior who had gotten on my bus. She seemed completely lost. She said she was going to a restaurant on City Island Avenue. I could see she was confused. There was just something about her. She looked so elegant, but with a fur coat on a hot summer day, so I said, 'Are you okay?' and she said, 'I'm fine, but I don't know what restaurant I'm meeting my friends at.' I said, 'Get on. Sit in the front.' I asked a gentleman to get up so she could sit near me, and I said, 'I'll run in and I'll check each restaurant for you.'So I checked the restaurants and no luck, but at the very, very last restaurant on the left, I said, 'It's got to be this one. Let me swing the bus around,' and I swung it around. I said, 'Don't move. Let me make sure this is the place before you get out.'It was a hot day, and she's got fur on. She could pass out. So I said, 'Stay here, sweetie. It's nice and cool in here.' I went in and I said 'There's a lady in the bus and she's not sure of the restaurant,' and I saw a whole bunch of seniors there and they said, 'Oh, that's her!'I ran back to the bus and I said, 'sweetie, your restaurant is right here.' I said, 'Let me kneel the bus.' Kneeling the bus means I bring it closer to the ground so she gets off easier. And I said, 'Don't move.' I remember my right hand grabbed her right hand. I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine. It was a bus, but I wanted to make her feel like it was a limousine. And she said, 'I have been diagnosed with cancer--but today is the best day of my life.'And I've never forgotten that woman (Weeping). She's diagnosed with cancer and just because I helped her off the bus, she said she felt like Cinderella. Can't get better than that. And doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It's pretty awesome.”

“She raises her hands and places them on either side of my face. My skin burns beneath her touch. 'I think you're beautiful.'I smile, thinking she's done. But she releases my face and places her palms on my chest, directly over my heart.'You're beautiful right here,' she says.I close my eyes, and the breath rushes from my lungs.'I see the good in you, Dante,' Charlie continues, her words rolling together off her tongue. 'Even if you don't, I do. You have a good heart. You know how I know?'I open my eyes. She's looking at me like nothing else in the world exists. Like the entire planet and all of mankind just vanished. She slowly wraps my hands inside her own as best she can and places them on her chest. 'Because I feel it here.' She taps our hands against her chest. 'I know you're good, Dante. Because I feel it inside of me.”

“I think the way I feel when I look at Evan comes from her. In pictures taken the day she married my dad, she was reckless, laughing, spinning around in circles. She looked like her whole world was him. She looked a kind of happy I can't even imagine.I don't want that. I don't want to be like that. I don' want to feel the way she did because I know what happens when you do. You love with your whole heart, with everything, and you wake up one morning and kiss someone good-bye the way you always do except you mean it as good-bye forever. ”

“Three days later, Mrs. Dalloway was in the hall, blocking the classroom door. 'Hi there, Dick. Are you prone to seizures?''Uh, no.'Thirty minutes later I was wishing I'd said 'Uh, yes,' because then she's have had to turn off the strobe light. Then again, it might not have made a difference; the loud electronic music and Mrs. D's yelling probably would have been enough to do me in anyway.”

“There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget. She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”