“Even though it had only been two weeks since I’d seen him last, it felt like months, and sometimes I found myself wondering if our brief time together had been real at all. Yeah, it had been real. I had a heart that was cracked in two as a souvenir of just how real it all was.”

“In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”

“If I told you that everything about you had been just made up by someone, that all of your thoughts, all of your memories, even the things you chose to say had been invented and that they weren’t real, that you weren’t real, would you believe me? I don’t think so.”

“It had been two weeks since her first real boyfriend, Jason, had brokenup with her on the eve of the first day of school. His exact words had been “Babe, you know I think you’rethe best and all, but it’s my senior year and I can’t have the baggage of a relationship. I gotta live it up,play the field. You get it, right?” Uh, not exactly. So Michele had to begin her junior year with a brokenheart, which grew all the more painful last week, when word spread that Jason was hooking up with asophomore, Carly Marsh”

“He wasa jerk. Moody. But there had been brief moments that I’d spent with him—like a nanosecond—when I thought I might have seen the real Daemon. Atleast a better Daemon. And that part made me curious. And the other side, the jerky one, yeah, that part didn’t make me curious.It sort of excited me.”

“Our room has two beds. If this had been a movie, [the hotel] would have been full so we would have had to share a bed. Why doesn't stuff like that happen in real life?”