Rachel

“It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me."

"I promise," I say.

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her."

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.

I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pleasure and chaos. My head is about to explode.

He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes-once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup-have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.

Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.

Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.

Alex.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“like yours. That’s because home isn’t where you are. It’s who you’re with.”
― Jodi Picoult, Off the Page

“I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium