Lenny’s face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.
Their secrets inadvertently sidestepped each other, unaware, like blindfolded elephants crossing the tiny room.
She was thinking that the grass really could be greener on the other side of the fence. It depended on who wa standing in the grass. Maybe you had to go take a look.
I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn’t know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot.
I know I’m still young and there’s a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that’s wrong, that I’m not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I’ll always just be alone.
They looked for one another when nothing else was happening, the way you pick up a magazine or look in the cupboard for a snack. Not exactly by accident and not exactly on purpose. You could go out in the world and do new things and meet new people, and then you could come home and just sit on the stoop with someone you had never not known, and watch lightning bugs blink on and off.
A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey.
What can you do? You pick yourself up. You pull yourself together. You move on.
The trouble with being too careful about your wishes, though, was that you could end up with a wish so shapeless that it could come true and you wouldn’t even know it, or it wouldn’t matter.
My dance on the pedestal was my friendship with Maureen. I wasn’t sure how I had lost my balance and fallen off. Or whether I was pushed. Everyone around me was trying to get me to dance again. The thing was, I hadn’t quite given up on getting back up there. I still believed it was the only place where I could be happy.
Debbie wondered if it was true that there was only one person in the world for every person, and if she had already met him, and she either had to find a way to be around him again someday or always be alone. Romance-wise. She didn’t quite believe this. What seemed more likely was that there were at least five or six people scattered around the globe who you could bump into and, wham, it would be the right thing.
I tried to think whether I had ever had a great adventure. I decided that I had. It’s all in how you look at it.
Good-bye, ocean,” said Alix. “This was the best time I ever had.” “You always say that,” said Jools. “It’s always true,” said Alix.
Our brains are always busy, even when we’re not trying. They take all of the events and information of our days and try to make them fit together. Try to make sense of them. And now and then, two or three pieces of information fit together in an unexpected way. This is called “getting an idea.