Lauren Oliver

Everything else is nothing.

Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle." I pronounce her full name, very slowly, partly because I need to reassure myself of her existence__ena, my friend, the worried one, the one who always pleaded for safety first, who now makes secret appointments to meet with boys. "You have some explaining to do.""Hana, you remember Alex," Lena says weakly, as though that__he fact of my remembering him__xplains any

An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.

The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.

You can__ cheat if there are no rules

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

I thought you were dead,_ I say. __t almost killed me.___id it?_ His voice is neutral. __ou made a pretty fast recovery.___o. You don__ understand._ My throat is tight; I feel as though I__ being strangled. __ couldn__ keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn__ true, and you were still gone. I__ wasn__ strong enough.__e is quiet for a second. It__ too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me.Finally he says, __hen they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn__ even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.___lex._ The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach.__ didn__ die. I don__ know how. I should have. I__ lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game__o see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I_____e breaks off abruptly. I can__ hear any more; don__ want to know, don__ want it to be true, can__ stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn__ push me away. But he doesn__ embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue.__lex._ I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. ____ so sorry. I__ so, so sorry.__uddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. __here were days I would rather they have killed me._ He doesn__ drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. __here were days I asked for it__rayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you__he hope for it__as the only thing that kept me going._ He releases me and takes another step backward. __o no. I don__ understand.

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.

I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just...chaos.

The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come.

But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him. Because I do want. I'm not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

There's still always the possibility that I've gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don't think so anymore.An article I once read said that crazy people don't worry about being crazy - that's the whole problem.