Sara Zarr Quotes

That's how you know you really trust someone, I think; when you don't have to talk all the time to make sure they still like you or prove that you have interesting stuff to say.

It's as if once you hit high school, you're programmed, like a robot, to be an asshole to your parents.

Ethan couldn't possibly understand it, what Cameron and I meant to each other and how different it was from anything like a romance or a crush.

Sometimes you should have something you don't need but that you want.

Katy skipped over, her low-rise jeans threatening to fall off her skinny hips. With some girls, that was a sexy look. With Katy, it made you nervous.

I get a message from my dad. In the mood I'm in, I tear up to see his name in my inbox, and imagine him down the hall in bed, propped on pillows, emailing me.
"Hon,
Enjoyed our gelato date the other night. I just want to say I'm proud of you for a lot of reasons. Also, I've attached a picture of my foot."
He's such a weirdo goofball. I love him.

I can't believe this crap. Jolly ranchers? Gummy worms?" Katy rifled through the pile of candy she'd dumped onto Steph's floor. "Where's the chocolate? Where's the candy corn?"
"I like Jolly Rangers," Steph said, helping herself to Katy's rejects, her boobs in danger of breaking loose from her Renaissance dress.
Gil watched, fascinated. "Remind me who you are again?"
"Um, Juliet? From Romeo and Juliet?" She popped a candy into her mouth. "Shakespeare?"
"Did they really dress like that back then?" Gil asked. "It seems kind of like something that might get you burned at the stake."
"I'm pre-Puritan, baby."
Ethan unwrapped a peanut butter cup from his own candy pile. "You've obviously never been to a Renaissance fair, dude. I went to one in New York with my cousin. Boobs galore."
"We gotta get one of those in Utah," Gil said.

I didn't 'decide' to write YA, per se. But every time I thought of a story, it featured characters 15, 16, 17.

If two or three of the most important people in your life are telling you something and you are resisting it with everything you have, there is a distinct possibly [sic] that what they are saying is true.

Love.
That was the piece that had been missing, way before Prague. That was that piece that had been missing in her life until Will came and made her feel it, for their work together and for the beauty and also for him, though it was hard sometimes to separate those things. Maybe she didn`t love Will like she thought. Or couldn't in this moment.
But what they'd done together, what had been open by becoming so close, she could still love that. She could love their conversations and their hours at the piano and the results of their work. She could even love the way it hurt right now, because when was the last time she gave her whole heart to something?
That, all of it, belonged to her. She didn't have to let Will take it away, the way she'd let her grandfather, the business, herself, take her love for music.

They're lucky," I said. I was already imagining our good-bye-we'd both cry, we'd have a good long hug, we'd say things we might be scared to say if we knew we had to look each other in the eye the next day.
"I don't know about that. I can be a pain." He laughed then, and bit into a donut. "You might have noticed."
I laughed, too. "Might have.

At least you know what you want. I don't know what I want." Then he was quiet for a long time. We were almost home before he said, "Just want to be with you. Like this."
My heart sped up. I made a joke. "That's probably not a viable career option."
"Yeah," he said, laughing a little. "Probably not.

Ethan and I are done," I said finally. "I'm sorry." "He was my first boyfriend." "I know." "The only real boyfriend I've had. I'm a senior in high school and he was my only real boyfriend." "I know." "And I won't find another one at Jones Hall. That is guaranteed." "Okay." "This is all very sad and tragic," I said. Alan unwrapped a sleeve of Smarties. "Yet, oddly, you don't seem that upset." "I know.

When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks ... that's just rewarding and humbling.

It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.

How did you find me?"
"I've followed you for a long time." He must have mistaken the look on my face for alarm or fear, and said, "Not literally. I just mean I never lost track."
But it wasn't fear, or anything like that. It was an instant of realization I'd have a lot in the coming days: I'd been thinking of him as coming back from the dead, but the fact was he'd been there all along. He'd been alive when I cried in my room over him being gone. He'd been alive when I started a new school without him, the day I made my first friend a Jones Hall, the time I ran into Ethan at the library. Cameron Quick and I had existed simultaneously on the planet during all of those moments. It didn't seem possible that we could have been leading separate lives, not after everything we'd been through together.
"...then I looked you up online," he was saying, "and found your mom's wedding announcement from before you changed your name. I didn't even need to do that. It's easy to find someone you never lost."
I struggled to understand what he was saying. "You mean...you could have written to me, or seen me, sooner?"
"I wanted to. Almost did, a bunch of times."
"Why didn't you? I wish you had." And I did, I wished it so much, imagined how it would have been to know all those years that he was there, thinking of me.
"Things seemed different for you," he said, matter-of-fact. "Better. I could tell that from the bits of information I found...like an interview with

The importance of our connection, what it meant to find each other again, the way it made what happened to us and between us not be a waste, not be for nothing. He would know, he had to know, that not saying good-bye would be the worst end of all.

Sometimes you want to hear your own mother's voice.

Sitting and waiting for something to happen was the worst kind of torture.

I always felt that church is where I'm going to find my community and people to live my life with.

His voice just shot through me. It's amazing, the things your body will do just when you don't want them to: heart speeding up, fingers aching. I'd always liked his voice, low and laid-back, the kind of voice that made you listen, a voice that still caused me to teeter when I heard it saying my old nickname.

Life needed a fast forward button. Because there were days you just don't want to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it.

What brings two people together anyway?

The past only had whatever power you gave it; life was what you made it and if you wanted something different from what you had, it was up to you to make it happen.

That's what music did. It made you feel.
...
Music, her grandfather always told her, was language. A special language, a gift from the Muses, something all people are born understanding but few people can thoroughly translate.

Alan, as per his usual routine, got up early and peeked into my rom to check on me. What he found were his teenage stepdaughter and her childhood sweetheart curled up in the same bed, sound asleep and draped all over each other. He hissed my name, alarmed: "Jenna!"
"Wha-?" I sat straight up, immediately aware of what was happening and how it all looked. I clambered over Cameron, who was just coming to consciousness, and followed Alan into the kitchen.
"It's nothing, I swear," I said in a whisper. If Mom wasn't up yet, I wanted to keep it that way.
Alan shook his head. "It looks bad." He glanced toward my bedroom. "Was that Ethan? Tell him to come out here. I want to talk to him."
"Um, it's not Ethan. It's Cameron."
He put his hands to his head. "Jenna. Jenna."
"I know. Is Mom awake?"
"Not yet."
I kept my voice low. "Can we talk by the fish tank?"
He led, I followed.
"He came to my window in the night," I explained. "He needed to talk. I let him in. It was me. It was my idea. It was all...nothing happened."
"This isn't my area," Alan said, looking at the fish. "Your mom is supposed to do the tough stuff. We have a policy of laissez-faire when it comes to me and...this kind of thing."
"Exactly. So," I said hopefully, "go make the coffee and we'll pretend nothing every happened."
Cameron came into the room, his blanket wrapped around him. His hair was sticking up in the back, and his long eyelashes hooded sleepy e

I tend to describe recurring themes as being part of a writer's DNA - something so deeply embedded in us that even we don't notice it until we've written three or four books.

My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.

Does all this have anything to do with Cameron coming back?"
"Basically."
She didn't put any letters down. Our game had effectively stopped. "I know you might think you want to be with Cameron that way," she said, "but remember it's been such a short time that he's been back, and-"
"It's not that."
"Are you sure?"
"I don't picture us together, like a couple. It's more like..."
"Like a brother?"
"Mom, could you just listen?" She clamped her lips shut. "Not like a brother," I said. "It's almost like nothing would be enough. Being a couple wouldn't be enough. Being like brother and sister wouldn't be enough. It's an endless sense of...I don't know." I could tell her it was killing her not to talk. I sighed. "Go ahead."
"Unfinished business," she said, with a rush of breath. "That's what I see between you two."
"Unfinished business?"
"Yes. And I think it will feel that way until the day you die."
I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was. "Great.

Love is just a word we use to describe what boils down to a selfish and temporary state of happiness.

I do have a little bit more confidence in - or at least familiarity with - my process. For example, when it feels like it's going badly or that I'm lost, I know I'll eventually find my way because I've been through it before. But writing itself is still hard.

Or she could return to the beginning, to the first moment she`d started to feel like playing wasn`t for her anymore. But she coudn`t rehash every hurt, every disappointment, every moment that felt like betrayal. And expect to arrive anywhere good.

I don't want these memories to become slippery, to just disappear into the thin air of life the way most things seem to. I want them to stick – even the bad ones – so I repeat them often.

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years.

And I don't just mean that they change you. A lot of people can change you - the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart, the first person who crowned you best friend. It's the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people.

I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

*Story of a Girl By:Sara Zarr
*Lexile:760 SRC:12 pts.
*Personal Issues
*Choice of getting a job to move out
*Major Choice
*In Process of making it happen
*It effects her bother his girlfriend and their baby, because they will move out with her too.
*Sometimes we need to take choices that will make your life easier and also others.

I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

There was a present on the front seat of Ethan's car, a Gap box tied with a white ribbon. "Happy birthday, Jenna," Ethan said, leaning over to kiss me, his lips cool from the iced chai he stopped for every morning. I opened the box and pulled out an orange sweater with a cream-colored stripe down the arms.
"Thank you. I love it."
"I know," he said, pulling away from the curb. "That's what you said when you handed it to me at the store and told me to get it for your birthday."
"I'm sorry," I said, holding the sweater in my lap. I knew he was just teasing, but I wanted to be the kind of person who could enjoy surprises. I wanted to be as spontaneous and free as everyone else seemed to be and not feel all the time like if I didn't follow some kind of specific map of daily life, disaster would be right there waiting. "I just...really liked it."
"And wanted to make sure you got it," he said, smiling. "So basically you're greedy."
"Basically.

The sight of them (her friends) let a little air into her soul.

We don't have to do this," I said.
His jaw set in a way that reminded me of how he'd look some times back in grade school, standing around the fringes of s kickball game or on that bench by Mr. Lloyd's room. "We do, though."
I shook my head, staring at the house. Right then, a woman walked out, carrying a bag of trash. "Let's ask her if we can go in," Cameron said.
"Go in?"
He turned to me. "Yeah."
I lowered my voice to a whisper. "Shouldn't we, like, talk about it first? About what happened?"
"Why? We know what happened."
"I can't."
"But I'm with you. We're together."
My eyes filled. He looked out the window. The woman went back in the house and closed the door. "We can come back some other time," I said, "after we've talked." I put the car in drive. "Let's go somewhere. Coffee. Something."
"Doesn't matte." His jaw was set again, his voice dead flat.
"It does matter, Cameron. That's the point. If it didn't matter I could just go in right now. I'm not ready. You can't just show up after all these years and expect me to be ready." He opened the door and started to get out. "Wait, where are you going?"
"Sorry I came here and messed up your life."
"That's not what I said!" But he was out of the car, walking down the block, away from me.

I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

He felt it too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That's the way I remember it.

We had this time. We had this little bit of time together for being honest. It felt sharp and finite, like it could end any second without warning. "I know you want me to be different than I am," I said. "But you could have helped me be more of what you wanted by actually talking to me. Telling me things.

I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.

It's a jagged thing in my throat, how much I miss her.

I don't understand, Jenna, why you couldn't give him a ride home?" Mom struck the archetypal Mom pose-hands on hips, perplexed look on face, head tilted at that I cannot believe you came from my womb angle. "He walked home in the pouring rain. With a cold, I might add."
"I didn't know he had a cold. I was at the JCC with Steph," I said, knowing that was not going to fly. Cameron padded into the kitchen on bare feet, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.
"It's fine," he said. "I didn't have to walk that far."
Mom shook her head. "It's not fine. While you're living with us, you're part of the family, and we don't leave each other stranded in the rain.

So, Cameron," Steph continued, "auditions for the school play are next week. You should come. We need more males of the species to try out."
"Not my thing," Cameron said.
"okay, so you don't want to be onstage. You could be backstage."
"With Jenna," Gil said helpfully. "She's the stage manager-"
Ethan talked over Gil. "But if it's not our thing," he said, "it's not your thing. You don't even have to have a thing if you don't want."
"Right," Katy said, "no thing required."
Cameron didn't respond, didn't even act like anyone was waiting for him to say anything. He just ate his lunch, scooping spaghetti onto a piece of bread and folding the bread over into a sort of sandwich before putting it in his mouth. I was fascinated by the most mundane little details of him-how he held his paper napkin in his left hand while he ate with his right, the space he took up when both his elbows were on the table.
I was suddenly aware that I'd been staring at him, and everyone else at the table was staring at me. They were all done with their lunches. I wondered how much time had passed.
"Um," Katy said to me, "are you all right?"
Steph caught my eye and smiled slowly.
"Oh,yeah." I concentrated on my half sandwich trying to think of something witty to say, but I was in total Jennifer Harris territory now, spacing out and forgetting how to make simple conversation.
Cameron picked up his empty tray. "Nice to meet you all. See you later." He li

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

The doorbell rang during dinner. Alan got up to answer, saying, "If it's the missionaries I might let them in. I'm too tired to put up a fight.

Remember that time we got snowed in at school? Everyone had to wait for their parents to get them, but our parents didn't come."
"God," I said, "I'd forgotten. Why can't I remember any of this stuff without being reminded?"
"School bus driver had to take us home eventually. We were the only two kids on the bus."
"I can picture us," I said, "sitting next to each other on that backseat. It's such a sad scene, really."
I felt him look at me. "I don't think so. I never thought of it as sad."
"But Cameron, every single kid in the school got picked up by their parents except us!" I was laughing now at the tragic ridiculousness of it. "It was pathetic!"
"We head each other. I never needed anyone else. That's the difference between you and me," he said. "You need all these people around you. Your friends, your boyfriend, everyone. Every single person has to like you. I only ever needed that one person. Only ever needed you."
"Not everyone has to like me," I protested. "It's just..." We'd arrived at my house. "Imagine if you'd believed I died," I said. "Trust me, you'd start to need other people. You had the luxury of always knowing I was alive, knowing where I was and what I was doing. I didn't have that, Cameron."
"I didn't think of it that way when it was happening," he said. "Didn't ever think you needed me much as I needed you."
"I did."
"I'm sorry," he said. "But I knew you'd be okay."
"How, Cameron? How did you know that?"<

In a way, "failure" is just another word for "the journey," for not being there yet but on the way. It's the road we walk on to get wherever it is we're trying to go.

We should just get a giant bottle of bargain vodka or something," Gil said, pushing his gorilla mask back on his head.
"Not classy," Steph said. "This is a special night, not a frat party."
"Special? Classy??" Ethan asked. "Steph. We're seniors in high school going trick-or-treating. We look like third-rate street performers.

I understand that you can never have the whole picture; inevitably, there's stuff you don't know, can't know. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I'm convinced there are parts of myself inside them.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

Sometimes I see the future and it's like I'm a blank. I mean I know what I'll look like, that I'll exist. But I don't know who I'll be or who will be with me. At least I know who I'm not and who won't be with me.

Is this okay with you, Jenna? For him to stay here?"
"Yeah," I said. "It's good. You have no idea what it takes for him to ask for help."
I spent all evening in Alan's office, reading at his desk and keeping Cameron company. Mostly he slept, snoring lightly and once in a while murmuring unintelligible something into his pillow. I turned my chair so that I could look at him whenever I wanted, at his face or at the bare foot that stuck out from under the covers, or at his arm dangling off the side of the sofa bed.
Around eleven, when I was ready for bed, Cameron woke up. I brought him broth and crackers. "Hi," I said.
"Have you been here all this time?"
"Most of it."
Alan's beige pajamas looked small and uncomfortable on Cameron. "You don't have to," he said. "I can take care of myself." He reached for the broth. I watched him slurp straight from his bowl, everything about him becoming younger and more boyish by the second-rosy lips on the white rim of the bowl, wrists without enough pajama sleeve to cover them, cowlick hair and sleepy eyes.
"I know you can. But you don't have to."
"Well..." He finally looked at me. "Thanks.

We'd need a miracle," he says. "A real one. Do you think those happen anymore?

I, Deanna Lambert, belong to no one and no one belongs to me.
I don't know what to do.

But as I get older I think – can it really be love if we don't talk that much, don't see each other? Isn't love something that happens between people who spend time together and know each other's faults and take care of each other? In the end I decide that the mark we've left on each other is the color and shape of love. That's the unfinished business between us. Because love is never finished. It circles and circles the memories always out of order and not always complete. There's one I always come back to: me and Cameron Quick, laying on the ground in an aspen grove on a golden fall day, the aspen leaves clattering and quaking the way they do. Cameron turning to me, reaching out a small and dirty hand, which I take and do not let go.

It came down to the smallest things, really, that a person could do to say I'm sorry, to say it's okay, to say I forgive you. The tiniest of declarations that built, one on top of the other, until there was something solid beneath your feet. And then ... and then. Who knew?

Because love, love never finishes.

You were never what I wanted to forget.

Because love, love is never finished. It circles and circles, the memories out of order and not always complete.

Making lists of favorite things is, for me, a task ridden with anxiety. What if I've accidentally excluded something I love? What if I discover something new tomorrow that I love even more?

This was why Mom had told me to keep an eye on her. As tough as Dixie was, when it came to Dad she was a regular girl who wanted her father to love her. So

Das wird sich alles finden.
Everything will be okay.

I thought of what Cameron said about the day I came across the yard to him to ask him to be in my club. About how I had guts. About how I was brave and strong. He was around to tell me these things now, to remind me, but I was going to have to learn to remember them myself, and believe them.
I got up, crept to Alan's office, and went in.
"Cameron? Cam?"
He didn't move, and appeared to be fast asleep.
I'm not sure what I wanted. To look at him, I guess, and talk. I sat on the floor by the sofa bed so that my face was level with his. His breath came in short, toothpaste-minty sighs.
"Cameron Quick," I whispered, just wanting to hear his name. He still didn't move. I touched his face, following the curve of his jaw, the bow of his lips. This was the boy who made my childhood less lonely, who made me feel loved. And known. And accepted. Who had stared into my most terrifying moment right beside me, while my most terrifying moment was his everyday life. And I pictured him patting that baby doll by a cold window, showing it comfort by instinct. I felt overwhelmed with sadness for his life and what it could have been, even though I knew he wouldn't want me to feel that way. He'd say it was all right, that he'd get by, that he could take care of himself. That he didn't need anyone to fix it. But I still wanted to, to somehow make up for that infinite, infinite well of helplessness that I'd spent most of my life believing had swallowed us up.
It hadn't, t

Why did you come back to Salt Lake?" I knew the answer before I asked the question and he knew I knew, and it was like you could see the shadow of it hanging there between us.
"I needed to see you," he finally said. "It's hard to explain."
"You don't have to."
"I tried telling my mom once what happed that day. Showed her the hole in the window screen and Moe and even after that she said it was complicated, that my dad's a complicated man and we all needed to try harder to understand him." His voice was shaking now. "And I thought, hey, maybe she's right. Maybe he was just playing around, you know. Maybe we didn't need to run."
"We did," I whispered.
"That's why I had to come, see?" He didn't move and I didn't move, but in a few seconds I heard him sniffling and he couldn't stop and I knew he was crying. "Cameron." I propped myself up, reached out my arm. "Come here." He got up and came to me, dragging his blanket behind him like a child. I scooted over in my bed to make room. "Come on."
He positioned himself beside me-I stayed under the covers, he was on top of them, his head next to mine on the pillow. I stroked his hair and thought of the week he'd lived at our house, the way we slept shoulder to shoulder in our sleeping bags in the living room and I got another good memory.
Jennifer, Cameron had said. You awake?
His voice was coming from across the room. I sat up. Yeah.
Look. He was standing by the living room window. The blinds

Wait in the car." He opened the door and started to climb out.
"Hold on! How long should I give you? What if you don't come back in a certain number of minutes? Should I call the cops?"
"Don't do anything. Don't call anyone. I'll be fine."
"But what if you're not?"
"Then go home."
And with that, he got out and jogged down the street, like if I heard screams or gunshots or whatever I would just drive on home like nothing happened. Well, good for you, I thought, watching him climb a short cement staircase and put a key in the door. You don't need anyone. Fine.
I watched the clock. Three minutes went by, four. I thought about knocking on the door, having of course no idea what I would actually do once I got there. Maybe I'd have to break the door down, wrestle Cameron away from the bad men, and then carry him out the way you hear people when they get a huge burst of adrenaline. Except the person I pictured rescuing was little Cameron, in shorts and a striped T-shirt, his arms wrapped around my neck.
Then there he was, bursting out of the apartment door and bounding down the steps, a big garbage bag in hand. He ran to the car, fast. I reached over and opened the passenger door and he jumped in.
"Go."
You can't exactly peel out in a '94 Escort, but I did my best. Cameron breathed hard, clutching the garbage bag to his chest.
"What happened?" I drove a good fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit, convinced we were being chased

I'm going to check on you in the night," he said. "At random intervals of my choosing."
"I figured.

He said I didn't need to save him."
"But you want to."
"Yeah. But I can't. Right?"
"Probably not. Usually not.

My whole life has been one big broken promise.

Mom always says that doubt is just another way of expressing faith.

The mark we've left on each other is the color and shape of love. That's the unfinished business between us. because love, love is never finished.

Live in the present. Take care of the relationships in front of you now. Most friendships have a natural life, and when they've lived that out, you'll know.

Ethan didn't know anything about the fat girl, the Cootie Twin, the loner and reject. The only person who had ever picked Jennifer Harris was Cameron Quick, and sometimes when I was with Ethan I felt the smallest twinge of guilt, like being with him was a betrayal. The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he'd done for me and what we'd been through together, even if that loyalty was to a ghost.

Is it good, bad, or neutral to recognize thematic patterns in your own work? When it comes to recurring themes, I'm of the mind that knowledge is probably not power, at least in terms of the work.

I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.

don't mistake a new place for a new you.

Life doesn't have to be only anxiety about what's gone wrong, and complaints about the world around you.

I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.

And he left. I watched him walk out – he didn't say good-bye, he didn't even look back. It scared me, how easy it was for him to do that.

Was it only because he happened to be the one who came along when he did? Could it have been anyone? Or was there something about him, that I liked and cared at?

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.

I remember sitting here," he said, "and watching you over there." He pointed, but I didn't have to look. Before Cameron and I got close, I spent a lot of lunches the same way, starting off eating and reading on my special bench on the other side of the yard, followed by walking the perimeter of the playground, balancing on the small cement curb that separated the blacktop from the landscaping, around and around and around, hoping I looked busy and like it didn't matter that I had no friends.
I sat next to Cameron on the bench. "What did you think when you used to watch me?"
He leaned his head against the building. "That I understood you. That you'd understand me."
"Do you remember the first time you talked to me? Because I don't. I've been trying to remember for years and I can't get it."
"You don't remember? Wasn't me that talked to you. You talked to me."
I scooted forward on the bench and looked at him. "I did?"
"You walked right across the yard here at recess," he said, pointing. "Came straight up to me." He laughed. "You looked so determined. I was scared you were gonna kick me in the shins or something."
I didn't remember this at all, any of it.
"You said you were starting a club," he continued. "Asked me if I wanted to join."
"Wait..." Something was there, at the very edge of my memory, coming into focus. "Do you remember if it happened to be May Day?"
"That the one with the pole and all the ribbons?"
"Yes!"
"

The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he'd done for me and what we'd been through together, even if that loyalty was a ghost.

A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.

There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark ... Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless.

counted because things in my life had a way of disappearing on me, and I'd learned not to trust what I thought was there. What

He crouched down next to me. I put my hand on the hem of his jeans. It was the first time I'd touched him since that day in the cafeteria line.
"I've got so much to tell you," he said, so quietly I almost couldn't hear. "Been thinking about how to even start."
"Start anywhere," I whispered. "I just want to know."
"I feel like I've already told you everything, in a way. I've been talking to you in my head for eight years, writing epics and sequels to epics, and sequels to the sequels."
I let my fingers move down to the laces of his boots, then up to the top of his sock. One more millimeter and my fingertip would be against his skin. I moved it back down, resting on the knob of his ankle. "I'm here now," I said. "You can talk to me, right out loud."
Just then, two boys, eight or nine years old, crashed into the grove, leaping over the stream like we had. They froze when they saw us; I jerked my hand away from Cameron's ankle and sat up.
"Oh," one boy said, "hi."
"Hi," I said. "We were just leaving." I got up without Cameron's help, brushed myself off, and followed him back to the parking lot.

Because we were having a family crisis."
"Your family had a crisis?"
"Yes, Ethan. My family. Had a crisis. A crisis was had by my family.

What did it feel like, I wondered, to be kissed like that right out in public? Not like some passionate tongue-wrestling thing, just a kiss to declare: We are each other's. I'd never been kissed like that, not by him or anyone else. No one had declared me his, not for the whole world to see, anyway.

Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.

Trust me, Jennifer. Just...trust me."
I drove another block or two. "Why should I?"
"Why shouldn't you?"
Because you left me, Cameron. After everything we went through. But I knew it wasn't his fault, any more than it was mine. It wasn't like either of us had control over our lives. We were at the mercy of our parents, both of us. Anyway, I'd already turned the car toward the freeway entrance. I turned on the car radio and we drove twenty minutes without talking. When the exit finally came into view, ugly warehouses and the new Wal-Mart looming before us, I said, "Let's go to my old apartment first. I haven't been there since we moved."
"I've gone by it a couple of times."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Living there with you was kind of my best memory."
I imagined that, him going to the apartment and looking up at the window and thinking about me.

I got this strong feeling of missing him, like he was someone who I loved who had died and gone away, someone who was mostly a memory. I wanted to grab him and say okay, I was sorry about Tommy, it was just a stupid mistake and I knew I'd hurt him and I wish I hadn't. Because I did love him. I did.

There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.