That's the thing. She's mine, and you can't take her away from me. You can't do that. She's mine, too, Kara, and I love her more than I've ever loved anything, and you can't just take away what is mine. I can't live if you do. We can't be the same--YOU can't be the same-- if you do, and you know it.

 --------

Kara was seventeen years old when she met David, and he frightened her. Not because he was gothic, or in a gang, or intimidatingly popular. But because he looked at her and didn't just check her out or disregard her.

 David was frightening because, when he looked at her, she knew he was trying to figure out her secrets.

 David's intensity was the kind you see in movies and books as the loner, the smoker, the artsy, disillusioned guy who sees the world as it really is. But David, for all of his intensity, was none of these things.

David hadn't suffered any hard knocks, he didn't come from a broken home, and there were no real reasons why he should search so hard for truth.

 David was five feet and three inches tall when Kara met him, and he had an unlikely growth spurt at the age of seventeen and three quarters that would bring him to his final height of 5' 3.5". He had brown eyes and blond hair, and a scar horizontally across his forehead, above his left eyebrow, that he got while wrestling with his neighbor at the age of thirteen.

 Kara didn't understand how a boy like David could be so frightening and intense, as he was nothing like the boys she read about in books and saw in movies, but David's enigma took a backseat to her own whenever he looked at her.

It was then that she didn't wonder why he was the way he was, but instead wondered why SHE was the way she was, and what had made her that way.

 His wonder made her wonder.

 His curiosity made her want to hide.

He made her feel like her secrets were illegal and awful and necessary to understand herself.

Then he spoke to her for the first time.