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.
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?
We have the ability to pass our memories on. We just have to tell them to someone.
And I don’t want to talk about it, because one day his name will brush against my lips in her presence, and through and involuntary blushing of the cheeks, a misting of the eyes, a breath drawn too tightly, or a single tear, the secret I’m supposed to keep locked up forever will be revealed.
Everyone says that the internet is so awesome because you can connect with people from all over the world, but I think it’s the opposite. The internet doesn’t make it easier to connect with anyone – it just makes it so you don’t really have to.
Sometimes looking at Frankie is like seeing Matt through a glass of water – a distorted composition of him with all the right parts, but mixed up and i the wrong order. As I watch her sing his old song, I can’t shake the feeling that he just stopped by to say hello.
I’m not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I’m not sure of anything.
They say true genius often strikes in the pale moments between awake and asleep.
Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna.
It got him killed, but at least he felt something.
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.