"I was thirteen when my dad caught me with Tommy Webber in the back of Tommy's Buick, parked next to the old Chart House down in Montara at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. Tommy was seventeen and the supposed friend of my brother Darren. I didn't love him. I'm not even sure I liked him." (Prologue, p. 1).

"...in my head I wrote the story of a girl who surfed the cold green ocean, when one day she started paddling in the wrong direction and didn't know it until she looked back and couldn't see the shore." (Ibid, p. 1 (2).

"Every time someone in school saw my face, I knew they were thinking about it. I knew this because every time I looked in the mirror, I thought about it too." (Ibid, p. 6).

"It was the worst part of every day, when the bus got to my stop and...