“Two days later, he left for Yorkshire, and I prepared for what I'd come to think of as my "field trip" with Archer. Calling it that seemed safer and more business-like than "meeting" or, God forbid, "assignation." Still, I spent most of the day in my room by myself because I was afraid Jenna or Cal would be able to tell something was up with me. I was so nervous that I was shooting off tiny flashes of magic like a sparkler.I didn't even attempt to sleep, and I thought three a.m. would never come. Finally, at 2:30, I threw on a black T-shirt and some cargo pants, hoping that was an appropriate ensemble for meeting one's former crush who had turned out to be one's mortal enemy.”

“What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.”

“From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”

“I left out the part about Cal I being betrothed. Jenna was already practically wearing a Team Cal T-shirt. I didn't want to give her any more ammunition.”

“I would like to meet myself sometime to see how I would look to myself. But I'd have to be in an extremely good state of mind on such a day, because I don't like unpleasantness.”

“I kept thinking I wouldn't make it to Friday night. That something would happen before then to mess with my luck, something like a nuclear bomb going off so there was nowhere for us to meet."Pretty harsh," Leo said when I called him to come get me because she'd left me in the gutter with a broken nose. She never even called to check she hadn't killed me. A date like that makes a guy wish they would drop the bomb. Right over his house.”