Okay. how about that time when you smoked all that weed that you thought was laced with something? You fell into the tub, but you refused to get out because you were convinced that the back of your head was going to fall off? "That third story happened to a guy named Jace in my dorm. Me and Sam and another guy in our hall took turns reading "Paradise Lost" through the locked door. I think it made him more paranoid, though." "That's not true," he says. "Well, he *seemed* more paranoid to me," I say. "And he still gets a little weired out when any one mentions angels.

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

Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.

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.

Philip Sharpe was a soldier in God's army," says the minister. "Now he marches with the angels.

It’s hard to look at Barron now, but I do. He’s smirking. His black hair and black suit make him into a shadow, as if I conjured some dark mirror of myself.

I don't lie," I lied.