Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage.
"Oh, man," Autumn mumbles from beside me. "His smile makes me stupid."
Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won't be okay.

To her, not packing our lunches every day or joining the PTA is a feminist rallying cry.

Light bursts behind my closed eyes, so intensely I nearly hear the popping sound. It's my brain melting, or my world ending, or maybe we've just been hit by a meteor and this is the rapture and I'm given one last perfect moment before I'm sent to purgatory and he;s sent somewhere much, much better.
It isn't his first kiss - I know that - but it's his first real one.

This is how we reveal ourselves: these tiny flashes of discomfort, the reactions we can’t hide.

Lord knows why I find you attractive, Michael, when you generally smell like weed and broken hobo dreams.

I was diamond on the outside, and I would not break.
Inside, though, I was already broken.