It was that she truly believed you could be fourteen when you learned how love could change the speed your blood ran through you, how it made you dream in kaleidoscope color.

More from The Tenth Circle

• "Because everyone lies," Zephyr replied. All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what door hadn't yet been slammed in your face.
• The saddest day in the world will be the one when she stops pretending.
• And in the middle of all this, I started to think about the one thing that makes me feel really good and makes immediate sense...and it's you.
• Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.
• Absence is to love as wind to fire; it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
• Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!