Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but a Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Whatever, bro. We both had a long day. Too much drama. I'll TTYS." I wanted to ridicule him for using chatspeak IRL, but I found myself lacking the energy.

And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh.

She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.

At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.