Downstairs, Grandad's warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words, "In my day we were feared. Now we're just afraid.

Nobody ever really sees me the way I am, underneath everything. But she did. She does.

I heard you've been having some problems with your girlfriend." Headmistress Northcutt says. "No," I say. "Not at all." Audrey broke up with me after the winter holiday, exhausted by my moodiness. It's impossible to have problems with a girlfriend who's no longer mine.

It’s hard to come up with a scheme to thwart some other scheme you don’t even know about.

He’s quiet then. We lie next to each other, twin corpses waiting for burial.

You are the only thing I have that is neither duty nor obligation, the only thing I chose for myself. The only thing I want.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.