Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win.

“I’ll move heaven and earth to make you happy, Evie. I want you there when I wake up every morning and there when I go to sleep at night. I love you, even if you don’t do a damn thing I tell you to do.”

My story must be told in the daylight,” she said, as they gathered in the courtyard again, “For my shadow will not be here in the daylight.

I knew I’d miss you. But the surprising thing is, you never leave me. I never forget a thing. Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all. I know young people look at me and think my youth seems so far away, but it’s all around me, and you’re all around me. Tiger Lily, do you think magic exists if it can be explained? I can explain why I loved you, I can explain the theory of evolution that tells me why mermaids live in Neverland and nowhere else. But it still feels magic.

"I had a healthy disrespect for authority, and for as long as I can remember, when someone said 'don't do that,' what I heard was something more along the lines of 'doing that would probably be fun.'"