I touched his hand, carefully. Not too intimate, but not some half-assed there-there pat, either. Would he understand? Usually the thought process for a seventeen-year-old boy went girl touching me>omg>boner.

Girls get under each other’s skin. We get too close, too attached, too crazy, and then we can’t let go. Our claws sink too deep. When we separate, we tear each other apart.

Every time I opened my mouth, flame licked up my throat. I could have razed vil­lages, kid­napped princesses.

In a typical college romance novel, he’d be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who’d cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I’d smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles...

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if...

I am not the heroine of this story.And I’m not trying to be cute. It’s the truth. I’m diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison,...

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who’ve already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and...

We looked at each other with that resentment you feel when you want something so much it’s causing you pain, so much you start to hate it a little.

The whole summer was inside of us.

Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you’re gorgeous, you’re fearless and unpredictable, you’re a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at...

Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It’s all the same, really. All bullshit.

Most of the time romance isn’t even about love, anyway. It’s about escape. Fantasy. Salvation from the mundane. Save me from boredom, from exhaustion, from my undersexed body, from microwave dinners and reality TV, from...

The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see...

I was too young to care about boring adult jobs. I was still testing out how my heart worked.

Suicide isn’t really about death, though. It’s about change. Release.

Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

Sometimes all you know about where you’re going is that it’s away from where you are.

Anyone who’s happy in a world this fucked-up has some serious psychological issues. You think I’m crazy because I see things as they are. You’d rather put on Disneyland goggles and watch TV and pretend...

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With...

I’m not over you. I dream about you every night. I watch that fucking video over and over just to hear your voice. Does that make you happy? Is that proof I cared?

But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.

If you think you can stand looking and not touching for eight months, you’re welcome to try.””Try’ being the operative word,” he said, sighing. “No, I can’t. And I don’t want to try.

If I was gay, I wouldn’t need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a...