Lauren Oliver

That was what her parents did not understand__nd had never understood__bout stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you.""You don't know me," I say quickly."I want to, though.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand."I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand."Go," he says.

Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I__ only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it__ ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision.

Lord, help us root our feet to the earthAnd our eyes to the roadAnd always remember the fallen angelsWho, attempting to soar,Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,Came crashing back to the sea.Lord, help root my eyes to the earthAnd stay my eyes to the roadSo I may never st

Things weren__ always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn__ realize how deadly a disease love was.For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that__ one of the reasons it__ so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That__ symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases__tress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder__ever realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.

Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces_ and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake.

I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.

I'm dead, but I can't stop living.

Take down the walls.

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear_