You can’t really yell at your boyfriend for stealing your seat and your best friend. You also can’t yell at your best friend for stealing your boyfriend. Or you can…but Hi seemed like a much easier way to start the morning.

Time. I would have gone somewhere to buy time.

Despite having known him for almost a year, there were a lot of things I still didn't know about Zachary Goode. Like how soap and shampoo could smell so much better on him than anyone else. Like where he went when he wasn't mysteriously showing up at random (and frequently dangerous) points in my life. And, most of all, I didn't know how, when he mentioned the jacket, he made me think about the sweet, romantic part of the night last November when he'd given it to me, and not the terrible, bloody, international-terrorists-are-trying-to-kidnap-me part that came right after

Teenage girls read in packs. It's true today, and it was true when I was a teen growing up in a small town in northeast Oklahoma.

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.