My father had put these things on the table. I looked at him standing by the sink. He was washing his hands, splashing water on his face. My mamma left us. My brother, too. And now my feckless, reckless uncle had as well. My pa stayed, though. My pa always stayed. I looked at him. And saw the sweat stains on his shirt. And his big, scarred hands. And his dirty, weary face. I remembered how, lying in my bed a few nights before, I had looked forward to showing him my uncle's money. To telling him I was leaving. And I was so ashamed.

Because I'm on the phone, Mom!" "Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?" "Ahmadinejad." "Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?" "That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin's going too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going." "Don't be so fresh, young man!" "Gotta go," he says to me. "Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell." "Fall back, solider. Over and out.

She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

It's another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent and hot...It's the eighth deadly sin. The one God left out, Hope.

I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

The feeling that you get.... when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.

You can't argue with the dead, no matter what you say, they always have the last word.