Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?

But I didn't. I didn't say anything, if only because I had no idea how to respond to such an overture. If my experience with friends was sparse, what I knew about boys- other than a competitors for grades or class rank- was nonexistent

I turned and looked into the gas station, where Wes was now paying, as the man who'd driven us looked on. "That's too bad," I said. "It's okay, though," she assured me. "Someday I'll show you an extraordinary boy, Macy. They do exist. You just have to believe me." "Don't worry," I said. "I do.

That's what this has been all about for you, correct? Make it clear. That you and me--it was nothing more that you'll have with Spinnerbait boy, or the guy after that, or the guy after that. Right?" "Yeah, I said, shrugging. "You're right." He just stood there, looking at me, as if I had actually changed before his eyes. But this was the girl I'd been all along. I'd just hidden her well.

He doesn’t love me. He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person any more. He’s just a boy. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.

Please. She sighed. 'Can't a girl have high standards? I don't want an ordinary boy.

My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest.