Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.

I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business.

All the things paper-thin and paper-frail, and all the people too.