"Prep" [.]

'grubby thoughts'
__ (Mom)'d have been as horrified as I would have if suddenly I'd started describing Cross. Really, we did not share a vocabulary that would allow for such a conversation;
__ Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around?
__ (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound)

The adult Lee's voice, is probably my favorite part in the book.

• (it is, of course, a mark of my own youth at the time that to try too hard struck me as so sad, as if the world were not full of many greater sorrows),
• Of course, now I wonder where I had gotten the idea that for you to participate in a gathering, the other people had to really, really want you to be there and that anything short of rabid enthusiasm on their part meant you'd be a nuisance.
• Sometimes - more often than not, though it was not until I was older that this fact stopped surprising me - things really were as they appeared to be. {Like on reality TV shows...}
• (How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family?
• As I walked down the steps, I could have brushed against him. But there were so many tricks I didn't know then, so many gestures that I'd have thought would lock you in and represent promises.
• At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying.
• Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
• Now I think, Jean. Jean! You got your wish. The fire drill is finished, but so is everything else. Did we believe we could pick and choose what passed quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot - all of it was a long time ago.
• It seemed an impossible though t- so often did we all come together at Ault that I had begun to believe life contained reckonings rather than just fade-outs - and yet I also saw then... the time I had known any of my classmates, would feel decreasingly significant; eventually, it would be only a backdrop to our real lives.  In the telling, I would feel no pinch of longing or regret; I would feel nothing true, nothing at all, in fact, except the wish that my companions find me amusing.
• I've never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it's not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one's watching to see whether or not you get what you're after - if at Ault I'd felt mostly unnoticed, I'd also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for.

The world was so big! The sharpness of that knowledge went away almost as soon as I'd boarded the T, but it has returned over the years, and even now sometimes - I am older, and my life is very different - I can feel again how amazed I was that morning.

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