The guy thought he was Mick Jagger. I felt bad for him.

Aw, come on. I barely speak English, unless we're talking about the Lowcountry kind.

Your bird drinks whiskey and eats tobacco?" The old man frowned."Just be lad he doesn't like eatin' scrawny boys that don't know their way 'round the Otherworld.

High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.

Exactly. They're stupid. Who cares?" "I care. They bother me. And that's why I'm stupid. That makes me exponentially more stupid than stupid. I'm stupid to the power of stupid." She waved her hand. The moon blew away. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I looked at her out of the corner of my eye.

It wasn't about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn't about what she said in class--usually something no one else would've thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn't have dared to say. It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.

Why would you stick someone you love down in a lonely hole in the dirt? Where it's cold, and dirty, and full of bugs?