“The thought trail one another in my brain running from the back up to the front and dripping down again under my chin: I'm no one; I'll never make it in my life; I'm about to get revealed as a fake, I've already been revealed as a fake but I don't know it yet; I know I'm a fake and pretend not to. All the good thoughts - the normal ones, the ones that have occasionally surfaced since last fall - scramble out the front of my brain in terror of what lives in my neck and spine. This is the worst it'll ever be”

“My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.”

“My family stood right in front of me, talking and smiling. I felt like I was viewing one of those cheesy ad shots for camera companies. The ones I looked at and thought, fake, because no one's family ever looked that happy. Yet, the perfect family moment bloomed right before my eyes, and I wasn't a part of it.”

“Pain shoots through my head. fireworks. explosions. all inside my brain. the white world goes dark and i know what's about to happen. i'm the one leaving. i am the one gone.”

“I don't cry to get my way," I defended my emotional inabilities, and then began wiping away the tears. "It's just this is really hard.""Annalisa, if I thought for one second that the tears were fake, you wouldn't sway me. But, I've never seen so many honest tears in my life.”

“I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.”