“We were typical, happy thirteen-year-olds who were going out - which meant we never talked or really acknowledged one another. It was wonderful.”

“We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.”

“We were talking about my dad, remembering him as vividly as possible as possible because we knew we weren’t going to get any knew memories. We were holding on to the old ones as tightly as we could.”

“There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us.”

“By the time we were in high school the only difference was that we were talking about how J.D. didn't know that tongue in a girl's ear wasn't a good thing instead of which one of us was going to marry the lead singer of Fall Out Boy one day.”

“You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is.’I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were”