She thought he was going to kill her this time, but that was one of the unspoken rules: no killing each other. Also: no kitchen knives, no purpose-built weapons of any kind. No screaming, either. Neighbors, the police—they wouldn’t understand.

My mother’s screams woke me up.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

I'm sure a terrible something has occurred at every inhabitable coordinate. 

in the middle of the night i will sit on your leg on a swivel chair, watching your favorite music videos, galvanizing our similarities. we transport ourselves into the future.

The first time I met Nate he asked if I masturbate.

I borrowed my mother’s car and went to the mall a lot and stole things, which I then threw into the dumpster outside. One time I drank an entire bottle of Nyquil and almost died, but nobody noticed.

For two years I worked in the office of a famous Christian singer as he approached the end of his life.

I didn’t like him at first. Seemed like a motherfucker. Girls-dripping-off-him-type, but rough. Scared me & pissed me off, how he looked me up & down. That force, that asshole face, eyes like daggers daring me to see what would happen if I didn’t.

Then I read Journey’s first page.

Storm clouds dangle from the sky, the colour and consistency of wet cotton. Way back in the nineties, when long plastic sausages of cotton discs were a luxury that only the cornucopian West could

I would talk to the doll, then it would talk back to me, reflecting me to myself. And then I’d adjust my behavior accordingly. And, eventually, become a better, less annoying person. It’s kind of genius in a way?

Under a contrived knit brow, his eyes aimlessly drifted among a thicket of words, until they happened to stop on depling, noun, German to Middle English, a child born to older parents, and thus he found a new label for himself, more succinct than his mother’s change-of-life baby and less piercing than faggot, which Joey Novakis and his friends would blurt as they passed him in the school hallways.

A furious hellhound runs at her. Katja kicks this final test away. Lashes a heel into the beast’s sternum. And she feels nothing. Numbed somehow inside her phalanx of a thousand suns. Only rags and ragged breathing, one of her eyes damaged red to melting: She feels nothing.

You were familiar with this posture, of a girl waiting for someone to notice her not notice them.

There are times when you just want to go up to no one in particular, and say, “Fuck you and the nutsack that held nightmare-you for x amount of time,” even if, and perhaps especially when, the eventual target is your own face.

I have a dream, after selling this book, someone asks me what it’s about. I explain and they say,  So, the narrator is still pining after Finn? They put emphasis on the word ‘still.’

Ethan had saved $100,000 for his trip. I had $8,000.

Men are tyrants with their time; but women are tyrants with the eternal.

I rotate my foot like a hot dog and I dare myself not to scratch. I let them land on collarbone skin, thighs, the sponge under my left eye. I’ve always been like this. I’ve always had small tits. You know what they call those.

I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.

Wafts of ancient loam and wet wood. He had viewed it all with sickening fascination, the swiftness with which something so solid could be torn asunder, cored completely.

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.