“Somewhere along the seashore, a strange wind blows over the ocean, and twenty oblivious boys simultaneously look up from their surfboards.”

“So Old Man Date Rape was number what?" she asks. "Four or five?""We're not counting him," I say. "This is the Twenty Boy Summer, not the Twenty Dirty Old Man Summer.”

“When you're out here alone, contemplating all the things you didn't do and the person you didn't become ... if you think about it too long a hush seeps into the gray space, and the wind will hollow out your bones, and the purest kind of loneliness comes up from the inside to swallow you like an avalanche.”

“Where is Frankie, anyway?" Dad asks. "It's almost noon. I'm surprised you two can stand the separation."I take a deep breath and gulp down some orange juice.Well, Dad, first Frankie lied to me about losing her virginity to the foreign exchange student on the soccer field, and how your first time can't be special and all that. Then we decided to have this twenty boy contest but we only met, like, half, and she lied again about sleeping with one of them when really they just kind of fooled around naked and broke up. Meanwhile, when I was casting off my virginity with boy number five (or was he six?), Frankie read my journal and found out that I was in love with Matt for a million years and by the way, right after you took that picture of us with all the cake and frosting, he kissed me and started this whole long thing that we weren't allowed to tell her about. Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean, where it was banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?..."I'll probably see her later," I say.”

“Virgin, right?" the voice asks again. It comes from the tall one with white-blond hair falling into his eyes. Frankie is still giggling, and my entire body goes hot and red, despite the chill in the water. If Frankie thinks she's just going to auction me off, well ... I don't know. It's kind of hard to be witty when you're trying to call forth a giant sea squid to swallow you up and drag you down to the depths of the ocean floor, never to be seen, heard from, or mocked again.”

“surrounding us is an ocean of mess and misunderstanding, full of pirates and sharks just waiting to see who slips in first”

“I understand how easy it would be to lose yourself in the heart of another. It‘s frightening. Exhilarating. An ocean with no lifeguard.”