As for the politics here, what can you do? There’s a lot of posturing, but it’s all kind of meaningless.

As I watched her leave, my mind shot ahead to a time in the future when we would not share a room, when our daily lives would not overlap. The idea made me feel as if I were being held underwater. Then I thought, you’re being so ridiculous; you have almost three more years together, and I could breathe again. But I knew, I always knew- and as unhappy as I often was, the knowledge never made me feel better; instead it seemed the worst part of all- that our lives at Ault were only temporary.

At Ault, it wasn't just that we weren't supposed to be bad or unethical; we weren't even supposed to be ordinary, and stealing was worse than ordinary. It was unseemly, lacking subtlety, revealing a wish for things you did not already have.

Before or after your stole my best friend? But the real question is if you were using me to get to Martha all along, or if you just took an opportunity when you saw it.

But then she’d know what she’d probably only suspected- how messed up I really was, how much I’d been misleading them for the last four years.

But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood... If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been misled and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards.

But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgment in all our parts.

Cross would never want me to be his girlfriend; things like weather or certain songs could make me forget it sometimes, but I was always still myself.

During my time at Ault, I’d always felt I had things to hide, reasons to apologize. But I hadn’t, I saw now. In a strange way, it was as if all along I’d anticipated what would happen with The New York Times, I’d known how it would end.