'Life's a roller coaster that only goes up.' Well frankly I've been stuck at the bottom. To add on to my never ending home issues and the fact that my best friends have grown to hate me, I've had the lovely experience of being embarrassed in front of entire student body by the one and only Harry Clarendon, also known as the principal's son. The strangest thing isn't my social demise, though. It's the new girl's arrival at Waterford High who changes everything I've known about the town I've always lived in. My feelings tell me the new girls disappearance is just the start of something huge. 「A simulacrum of the real cannot become more real if it isn't, can it?」

Nora Blake repels ordinary. Adam Clarke is constructed entirely of ordinary. ● ● ● "I don't want to share you with the galaxy, Nora Blake," he says quietly, and all at once, all the stars inside my chest are being flung across the universe at full speed and for that particular moment, I am untethered. Unrooted. Flowing. Floating. Something. He doesn't have to, I think, instantly. I am vaguely aware of the fact that I am a kind of traitor: but there is no heavy stone of betrayal in my chest. The galaxy will wait. It will wait until this beautiful boy flings my fragile heart across the universe at full-speed, but right now, I'm so full of it that I don't even care. Look at that. Nora Blake gives up the galaxy. I look at him, then, and there's so much color oozing out of his perfect, jagged cracks that I feel like I'm in one of Nadia's Leonid Afremov paintings and there's a supernova in my chest. "You don't have to," I tell him, so quietly that I don't think he hears. His delicate rose-pink mouth is curved into a kind of frown and his baby-blue gray-flecked gaze is lost somewhere far, far away from the devoid town of Enfield. I recognize that much, and I wonder momentarily if he has his own galaxy somewhere. I don't want to share him either, I think.