She’s an old lady,” Barron says. “And she’s been locked up for years. Let her have some fun. She needs to blow off steam. Seduce old dudes. Lose money at canasta.

Every plan is a house of cards.

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then surely you should be friend to my friend.

Everything was strange and beautiful and swollen with possibilities.

She sits up. I can’t read her expression, but her cheeks look a little pink. “I didn’t think you were going to be here.” “I live here.

People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.

Every hero is the villain of his own story.