My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don't need to give myself the willies. I'm quite good at that - I can freak myself out wherever I am.

What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

He was one of those guys who'd pronounce I'm a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.

I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

I'm a true-crime addict. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can't stop.