6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did)

m startled into sagging against her

This is just as bad as if she kept you from having surgery or stopped your physical therapy halfway through. She’s just getting away with it because the world’s shitty about feelings and mental health stuff.”

Because she’s heartbroken and I’m angry at everyone but her, and we’ll forever be these two comets in the sky. The crash would be galaxy-changing, but we’re always going to miss each other in a mess of what-ifs.

It means something when a girl who doesn’t let people even see her wounds inside lets you touch the scars on the outside.”

How can one person hold all of you in the palm of their hand and not know it?

She’s prettier and she’s taller and she’s faster than everyone else, and when she looks at you, all blue-gray serious, the world doesn’t fade, it sharpens. Like you never knew it was there until her.

Sometimes you have to rise to the occasion. And you rise when the occasion is life or death.

Are the women in my family just doomed to repeat themselves? Is that what being a daughter is? To either follow or break free of her mother’s—and her mother’s and her mother’s—path? I don’t know if I’ll end up with someone who leaves, but I’m not going to lose her at seventeen like Mom did. (A spark of comfort in a fear that is too intense to control.)

Three squeezes. I love you.

It’s been a long life, and I’m just seventeen.