His fingertips lightly and unintentionally grazed her face and her ears, and Debbie’s don’t-get-in-trouble self felt itself making room for her alert-alert-something-new-is-happening self.
Whatever her name was, she was pretty. She had a thick, careless braid of chestnut hair, a quick smile, and dark, merry eyes. She wore some kind of a fuzzy lavender pullover, and when she crossed her...
He was thinking that maybe love was like starting a fire with two sticks. You've always heard that it's possible, but how likely is it?
I tried to think whether I had ever had a great adventure. I decided that I had. It's all in how you look at it.
Good-bye, ocean, said Alix. This was the best time I ever had. You always say that, said Jools. It’s always true, said Alix.
But at least I have my health, he said. It was a joke.
This was the danger of sharing your dreams with your parents. If you told them you wanted to learn to play the guitar, all they heard you say was, I want to learn to play the guitar, and then they fou...
Lenny’s face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life.
What can you do? You pick yourself up. You pull yourself together. You move on.
Life was rearranging itself; bulging in places, fraying in spots. Sometimes leaving holes big enough to see through, or even step through, to somewhere else.
Debbie wondered if it was true that there was only one person in the world for every person, and if she had already met him, and she either had to find a way to be around him again someday or always b...
A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey.
Step and land, step and land. That's all travel was. Throw in some running and a change of scenery. No big deal, right? And so, off he went. Off they went together.
I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and...
Their secrets inadvertently sidestepped each other, unaware, like blindfolded elephants crossing the tiny room.
The trouble with being too careful about your wishes, though, was that you could end up with a wish so shapeless that it could come true and you wouldn’t even know it, or it wouldn’t matter.
I thought Marie could handle whatever came along. I thought of her as someone who did whatever she wanted to. That's what she would have said. She skipped school a lot, and when she did come, no one s...
Over and over and over, Mom and Dad towed them out, turned them around, then let go. The water whooshed them back to shore. The hot sun above, the cold water beneath: it was a feeling you could never...
Many girls at school were infatuated with his shallow athletic splendor and his golden handsome features that were biologically inherited and had nothing to do with the kind of person he might actuall...
My dance on the pedestal was my friendship with Maureen. I wasn't sure how I had lost my balance and fallen off. Or whether I was pushed. Everyone around me was trying to get me to dance again. The th...