The most tragic thing about California is that nothing is permanent or real here,” he says. “It gets to you, you know?
We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us.
Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean where it is banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?
As we rolled down the Million Dollar Highway, I closed my eyes and held him close around the waist, and he squeezed my hand like it was forever, like we’d really found a way to stop time, and I wanted so, so badly to believe it.
Read them, Anna. Really read them.
Matt died of a broken heart.
I pick up my journal, mug, and granola bar wrapper, look up to the sky, and curse the God of Summer Vacations for getting me into this whole albatross-ditching, Sam-avoiding, aiding-and-abetting mess in the first place.
I wish we could get a real tree,” Bug says. “Then at least we’d have one real tradition, since that whole Santa thing’s a bust. I mean, if parents are gonna make up a cool story, at least do it realistically. Like, have the guy use FedEx or something-no way reindeer can fly with all that weight.
Because I realized I was falling for another guy, fifty-six.
But there’s something about Watonka, they say. Something that pulls us back, the electromagnet that holds all the metal in place.
I remember the feeling even now; an inescapable stickines of each other like magnets on the fridge. It’s funny how someone can be such an integral part of your life, like you laugh at the same jokes and eat your ice cream cones the same way and share your toys and dreams and everything but your heartbeats, and then one day – nothing. You share nothing. It’s like none of it ever happened.
If Frankie and I hadn’t wanted ice cream that stupid day, he’d still be alive. If I hadn’t gotten his heart all worked up kissing him every night since my birthday, he’d still be alive. If I’d never been born, he’d still be alive. If I could find the butterfly that flapped its wings before we got into the car that day, I would crush it.
Love didn’t save me; it changed me. Changed me into someone who could save myself.
The guilt of not telling Frankie about Matt and me is overwhelming, but it’s a pale second to the violation I feel that she read my most private, raw thoughts and destroyed them. She broke into my carefully guarded heart, stole the only remaining connection I had to Matt, and turned it into a monstrosity.
It was one thing to have your own kind of hope, an ember you could nurture inside, something to inspire you when things got dark. If it died, it was on you; no one else even had to know about it, and you were free to reignite it, or to give up and walk away. But when you were carrying it with another person, for another person, it was a dangerous dream. Treacherous as the sea, yet fragile as a bubble.
Sometimes love was a tonic. Sometimes it was a weapon. And so often it was nearly impossible to tell the difference.
The girl who’d written volumes on the walls but never said a word.
You can’t put a condom on your heart.
This boy wore the ocean in his eyes, green-gray-blue, ever shifting, and I recognized him immediately. Knew before he said another word that he was as dangerous as he was beautiful.
There were lots of ways to lose your voice.