When girls like us fall, there’s no one to catch us. Least of all that boy for whom we’ve taken the fall. We’re the girls with secrets and witchy hearts. We’re the girls who listen to sad songs. Who slow dance to them with tears streaming down our faces, even as a smile lingers on our lips. Who cry in our pillows at night and who ride our sunshine-yellow bicycle along the empty, desolate, miserable places, where no one goes.

Don’t you get it?” I spring up from the chair and pace. “It’s hopeless and I know it and I have no urge to date him. No urge, whatsoever. I don’t expect him to tell me he loves me because I don’t want him to and I know he won’t.

Bravery is picking up a pen and writing. Bravery is gouging out words from inside you and then imprinting them on a page to make them permanent. Bravery is knowing they might not ever be read by anyone, that the art you leave behind, the contributions you make to the world, might never be known by anyone. Bravery is knowing all of that but doing it anyway.

I grin and ask him something I've always wanted to ask. "Why do you always stare at my nose?"He glances at it for a second before whispering, "Because you've got freckles on it. Thirteen, to be exact. And seven under your eyes.

Thomas Abrams is magic. He’s a wordsmith, a baby whisperer, a blue-eyed asshole, but most of all, he’s like me: brokenhearted.

People think it's the monsters who do bad things, but it's not. It's people like us. All the monsters ever do is live in storybooks. Or in closets. It's the humans who destroy things. Life isn't black and white, James. It's all fucking gray.

I kiss my darling then.And my darling kisses his sweetheart.

Words have the power to make things true.

Art is painful, Layla. It's potentially dangerous. Explosive. It takes everything from you, sometimes more than you can afford. It's a beast, and it's always starving. You feed it and feed it... until you have nothing left. But you don't mind because you'd rather chase the high of creating something than live in the darkness. It's insanity.

He bends over me, curls his sleek, cut body all around me, making himself my world. Flicking his eyes all over my face, he whispers, “Dark curls; Golden eyes.” He rubs our noses together. “Thirteen freckles; Flowers between her thighs.” He skims his lips over mine. “Sweet; So sweet; My heart; My sweetheart.