Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.