Even if I don’t know a girl, or even if I know her but don’t necessarily like her, I’m all the time falling in love for brief, intense spurts.

Wind in our hair, sun on our skin, school done for the day and stored safely on a shelf til tomorrow…damn, this being alive thing felt frickin awesome.

I often get a particular wrinkled-nose look from Mom: mild revulsion mixed with fondness, as if she can’t quite believe she made me, this large, sometimes stinky, always untidy boy who double dips and chugs orange juice out of the carton even though she begs me not to.

Paul, watching you hallucinate is boring as fuck,” Roby said. “If you want to chill, great. If you’re going to drink your stupid purple drank, I’m going to take off.” And he did. I kept drinking my stupid purple drank, and he left.

That’s why I love that kid. I can get a proper roasting from him and still be good friends.

Roby was honest in a kind way. If I was being stupid, he told me. But he also talked me up, telling me my fashion sense was dope and that I had good taste in music.

In fifty years, we’ll be like those old men who spend hours at all-day breakfast diners. We’ll have big ears and tufting sprouts of nose hair, and we’ll guffaw at everything the other says. Heh-heh-heh, you know it, Roby. Pass the damn ham.

Roby thought he should get “dibs” on Natalia because he claimed her first, that’s what he was arguing. I’m not convinced it works that way. Natalia has dibs on herself, that’s what I think.

I almost fell into the trap of thinking too much about the moment instead of living the moment, which would have been disastrous, because once I start thinking like that, it’s hard to stop.