“My entire life has changed in the span of three weeks, but as the seals howl against the Pacific, everything around me remains exactly the same.”

“-Wait, Anna, do you hear it? Listen""-What is it?" It sounds like barking."-Look- seals." She points about thirty feet down the share where a dozen or so brown lumps wriggle and play in the sand, barking like some kind of water dogs, "-Wow", I breath. "I'm changing my answer.""Anna, What's the number one coolest thing you've ever seen in your life?" He asked me on night, about a week after my birthday, when We saw three shooting stars in a row behind his house. It was after midnight, and everyone was asleep but the crickets. I remember telling him about this crazy lighting storm I saw when I was ten. It was far away but I could see the rain billowing out in sails and sheets, all the dark blue-gray sky lit up in flash after flash after flash. "What's yours?" "It's always been the ocean. but I'm thinking about changing my answer." He didn't say anything after that. He just looked at my eyes for a long, long time, missing all the stars above Us until it was too light to see them anyway. "-What answer?" Frankie asks."-Seals. The seals are officially the number one coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.”

“What if I come back and I'm different, Anna? Sometimes you go to a place where everything is different, and everything you ever know changes, and no one ever looks at you the same? ”

“Every story is part of a whole, entire life, you know? Happy and sad and tragic and whatever, but an entire life. And books let you know them.”

“Inside her head, Frankie had the map to my entire life, and I to hers. I hated that my feelings for Matt were uncharted and unmapped like a secret buried treasure. ”

“No matter what happens next, I'm not letting this turn into another two weeks of silence, the entire history of us summed up in a series of near misses and almosts just because neither of us had the snowballs to say anything.”

“I can't stop thinking about what he felt like against my body, against my lips. I can't remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I've finally done it. That horrible, awful thing I swore I would never do.The frosting. The cigarettes. The blue glass triangle. The shooting stars. The taste of his mouth on mine in the hall closet. Gone. All I can think about is Sam. Matt is – erased. My whole body is warm and buzzing. Sam is smiling next to me, because of me. And I've never felt so lonely in all my life.”