“Not much about that first online conversation we had sticks out in my head except for his surprising interest in me. I probably would have forgotten about it if it weren’t for that. I would have dismissed him as just another creep.”

“It’s a game of Catch-22 I play with myself. If I keep acting normal, I hope one day I will be, but every time I try, I just let myself down. I’m so entirely sick of this game.”

“The psych ward is where you go to get from fragile to shattered. It’s like taking your car to get washed and getting your windshield broken in the process.”

“When I stared at the mirror and tried to recognize the girl without eyebrows, eyelashes, and bangs as myself and failed, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.”

“I want a normal life for a teenager. I want to ache from a long day at work. I want to be so busy that I don’t have time to post on my blog. I want to run the race of my life instead of being pushed along it in a wheelchair. I want to be on the ride of my life, you know?”

“Dad’s coming home tomorrow morning, I wanted to snap at them. I don’t know what you’re all talking about. Even so, I felt the world around me begin to slip away, my vision swimming as lightness filled my head. I couldn’t stand…I couldn’t think. Part of me, somewhere, knew that it was true.”