I might be a wicked girl who'd think nothing of eating a baby for breakfast, but I'd never allow myself to get expelled. It's far too public.

Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don’t know how you got from one to the next.

You mind your tongue!” “Oh, I do,” I said. “I sharpen it every evening on your name.

It's strange how a person can have a distinct distaste for herself, but still she clutches on to life.

That’s where proper stories begin, don’t they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?

It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.

This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.