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I love writing about the summer between high school and college. It's the last gasp of really being a teen.

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We make such messes in this life, both accidently and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks ...more

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The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and warriors coming to my door...more

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Nah," I said. "But if it does, just tell him I said to get back on the bike.""What?""He'll understand.

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Because you have to just go with the flow. Your life is not your own, with people coming in and out all the time. You get mellow because you have to.

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After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....li...more

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I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a differen...more

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I didn't pretend to know Eli at all, but even so, I'd noticed that his manner was slightly hard to read. It was something in the way he talked that ma...more

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Once you love something, you always love it in someway. You have to. it's like, part of you for good.

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Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd alwa...more

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So this had been all I wanted, a boy who understood how I felt. Now, though, I sometimes wished for more.

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It seemed like this day could go in so many directions, like a spiderweb shooting out toward endless possibilities. Whenever you made a choice, especi...more

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He grinned again. We'd only been seeing each other for a few weeks now, but this easy give-and-take still surprised me. From that very first day in my...more

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It was just a tiny moment. Not a kiss, not even real contact. But for all the things it wasn't, it meant so much.

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Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?