I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone.

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.

You're not the way everyone says you are," Kaye said, looking at him so fiercely that he couldn't meet her gaze. "I know you're not." "You know nothing of me," he said. He wanted to punish her for the trust he saw on her face, to raze it from her now so that he would be spared the sight of her when that trust was betrayed. He wanted to tell her he found her impossibly alluring, at least half enchanted, body bruised and scratched, utterly unaware she would not live past dawn. He wondered what she would say in the face of that.

She'd always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.

Sometimes,” Sam says, “I can’t tell when you’re lying.” “I never lie,” I lie.

He runs to the sink to spit it out. I grin. There’s nothing quite as funny as someone else’s misery.

Jones looks like he wants to slug me, which is only subtly different from his usual way of looking at me like I'm a slug.