Carol Rifka Brunt

I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider's web. That's because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.

That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.

Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. "Look at that," you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

But they gave me Finn. He said it like maybe it was worth the trade. Like it was something he would do again if he had the choice. Like he would take a man's legs and give away years of his own freedom if it was the only way. I thought how that was wrong and terrible and beautiful all at the same time.

I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

Then, who is Matilda?' I asked.Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. 'I suppose Matilda's the girl who felt like home.

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half the size. . . . I figured that, on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn't lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole lot of work.Then I had this thought: What if it was enough to realize that you would die someday, that none of this would go on forever? Would that be enough?

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign something so they would know it was really us. I was worried that my signature wouldn't look the same. I wasn't sure when that thing would happen that made it so you always signed your name exactly the same, but it hadn't happened to me yet. So far I'd only had to sign something three times. Once for a code of conduct for the eighth grade field trip to Philadelphia, once for a pact I made with Beans and Frances Wykoski in fifth grade that we'd never have boyfriends until high school. (Of the three of us, I'm the only one who kept that pact.)

_there__ just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you__e special, even though you know you__e not.

There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.