Eileen Cook

“He looks at me for a long moment. “You’re not the type of woman who gives up easily, are you?” Ican’t tell if he admires this trait or sees it as a sign of deteriorating mental health.”

“I am so sorry. I'm more sorry than I've ever been in my life. I don't mind being on restriction and having to clean the school. I can even live with the fact that everybody's mad at me, but I hate that I hurt you.""Do you love this guy?""No! He means nothing. The kiss meant nothing."Tristan looked me straight in the eyes, his stare pinning me to the ground. "That makes it worse, you know. I know you think that somehow it will make me feel better, but it doesn't. You threw away everything, and it wasn't even for someone that mattered.”

“Life isn't a vintage film," Christopher said. When he saw my confused face he explained. "Things aren't always black-and-white.”

“Karma is a bitch, bitch.”

“... Promise me you won't do anything stupid.""Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'd been planning to come up with the most moronic plan I could think of, but I guess now I won't.”

“To be fair, it's not just cycling— the term "sporty" isn't used to describe me. I don't run unless something is chasing me, and I have some kind of visual-spatial ball deficiency.”

“What's wrong? Are you trying to make me lose it? Why didn't you say something when I came in?""I didn't know I was supposed to. You called out for your mom. I didn't know I was required to announce my presence like it was roll call.”

“The entrance hall was designed to impress. The floor was a buttery cream-colored marble and the walls were paneled in dark wood. I'm not a lumberjack, so I had no idea what kind of wood it was, but it looked expensive.”

“Do you like kids?Only with barbecue sauce.”

“She was still getting organized, trying to get the books she'd taken out to fit into the shelf under the stroller. She would shove a book in, and then something, a juice cup, a Binky, or one disturbing Barbie-doll head, would fall out the other side. She would shove that back in, and then something else would leak out the other side. Her stroller was like a poorly designed clown car.I went over and helped. It was a good thing spatial relations were a strength of mine, because it required the geometry skills of Newton to get everything slotted into place.”

“Personally, I felt pretty safe. Librarians are like priests. You can tell them you want information on just about any subject and they never look at you weird. It's like a rule or something. I figured even in a small town like this, my question wouldn't be the strangest one the librarian had heard. I didn't know if librarians had any sort of official privacy code, but I was counting on confidence. They're not big talkers. It comes from being forced to be quiet all the time.”

“I was generally in favor of segregation of the dead and the living.”

“Your dad does like you. In fact, he wants to protect you from me. He told me to not bother trying to get my claws into you and drag you down to my level.Bother. Definitely bother. I like the idea of you getting your claws into me.”

“Apparently, in addition to muscles, Nate had an inner squirrel. He didn't have any trouble balancing on the tree, whereas I felt like I could fall out anytime.”

“I'm proud of you, honey. This is a positive thing to have in your life. I'm glad to see you moving in the right direction.I wasn't aware I was going in the wrong direction.”

“My mom giggled and whacked Dick with a dish towel. I would have whacked him harder with the cutting board, but that was just my preference.”

“I could have gone my entire life without the image of my mom and Dick engaged in a sexual role-playing game. Especially in my clothes.”

“Ah. Morrigan,” a voice said behind me. I jumped and spun around. Jesus. She must have been wearing super-quiet librarian shoes.”

“You better be careful, I've got a ladle. You never know what a trained killer can do with an innocent-looking kitchen utensil.I don't think you're a trained killer.So should I be insulted that you think I'm an amateur killer?”

“I'm not afraid,” I said, reminding myself and also putting the house on notice just in case.“Well, that's a good thing,” a voice said.I screamed and whirled around.”

“There was no doubt about it. I was falling for my stepbrother. Long term this would likely result in my ending up on a tacky daytime talk show with other people who had an unnatural love for their relatives.”

“I never worried about being a whale stalker before. I promise to leave them unmolested from now on.”

“When you're seventeen and the only friend you have in town is a stuffed animal that doesn't even belong to you, I think it's safe to say your life is officially in the shitter.”

“Old movies are black-and-white; they’ve got good guys and bad guys. The thing was, I didn’t want to live in the past anymore. It was time for my life to go full color.”

“Brenda cared for our bacteria with a love and affection that some people don’t show their flesh-and-blood children. She would sneak in between classes to coo encouragingly at them, cheering on their growth.”

“Popularity is a mathematical formula based on desirability criteria. High schools are a classic anthropological case study, and getting people to respond in the way you want is psychology. All science. It’s just not the type of science that you’re used to.”

“Doesn’t just about everybody disappoint their parents? They say all they want is for us to be happy, but what they really want is for us to be their do-over. Their second chance at life.”

“Having someone you can talk to is cool, but it’s been my experience that it is a lot harder to find someone you can be quiet with.”

“There really isn't a good way to tell a relative stranger that you think dead people are trying to tell you something. It's personal information. It's like telling someone you just met that you have a yeast infection. It might be true, but it's not the kind of thing people want to know about you. Plus, you know that every time they see you after that it will be the first thing they think about: There she is, the girl with the yeast infection/ghost problem.”

“Shit. I was stuck. I suspected Dick would skip the hassle of having to ferry me back and forth to talk to someone and instead convince my mom to toss me into a mental ward where I could stay out of his hair and he'd have her all to himself. I imagined myself wearing institutional pajamas and having to eat everything with a spoon because no one would trust me with a fork or knife. Most likely my roommate would be some freakish, giant-size woman who didn't speak because she'd chewed off her own tongue.”

“I made it until the threes before a new problem, in addition to my possible haunting, came up. I had to pee. Three hours fifty-two minutes. I tried crossing my legs and thinking dry desert thoughts. I wasn't going to make it until six a.m. No way. That left me two choices:1. Stay here and pee the bed. This option was fraught with a whole load of downsides, not the least being forced to sit in a puddle of my own urine for hours (three hours forty-seven minutes to be exact). Then there would be the morning humiliation to consider. Dick's great-grandmother probably made this bed by collecting feathers off her pet goose. He would shit if I peed in it. He would make me sleep on rubber sheets as long as I lived here. Plus Nathaniel would know. I would be his spastic stepsister with an incontinence problem.2. Leave the bed and make a run for the bathroom. This had the upside of not getting me a year's subscription to Bedwetters Anonymous. The downside was obvious. I had to leave the safety of the covers and risk the dead girl grabbing ahold of me.”

“Nicole put on a frowny face and leaned forward for maximum cleavage exposure. Nathaniel looked. Of course he looked. She practically was shaking her breasts in his face. If he wasn't careful, a wayward nipple was going to take out one of his eyes. Okay, so it would have been impossible for him not to notice. However, he didn't have to keep noticing. It was like his eyes had homing beacons on her boobs.”

“There went any progress we'd made in being friends. It was going to take more than shared lunches and singing Christmas carols to get over the fact that I'd basically implied he was capable of murdering his own family.”

“We reached to shake hands, and as soon as we touched, it felt like a current ran between the two of us. My heart sped up. Our eyes met. Nathaniel cleared his throat, and I realized he was trying to take his hand back and I was holding on to it with a death grip. I dropped his hand like it was a burning log. Oh God, I was turning into a stepbrother groper. He was nice to me, and the next thing he knew, I was hanging off him like a parasite. He was most likely grateful I hadn't thrown myself at his face for a tongue kiss.”

“I refused to believe that I'd gone from sane to full-blown delusional in one night. After some consideration, I determined I didn't have any other crazy thoughts. I didn't think I was Napoleon, or that my bagel was an alien, and I didn't have voices in my head warning me about terrorist plots. Near as I could tell, I was still on the right side of sane.”

“I couldn't decide if the fact that Nathaniel had watched me when I was sleeping was creepy or sort of exciting. God, I hoped I hadn't been lying there with my mouth open and drooling.”

“The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about.”

“Don’t worry, Prima Donna. If you start to look faint, I’ll drag your body to safety.”“My name is Hailey.”“Okay, Hailey. I’ll drag your prima-donna butt to safety, right after I finish my lunch break”

“You should step out of the box more often. See what the world has to offer.”“I stepped out of the box the night I broke the statue, and look where that got me.”“Exactly! You had a chance to get to know me as a result. Talk about lucky. Think what could happen if you tried again.”

“You got me. As soon as I saw your prowess with the floor buffer, I was yours.”

“We're guys. I punched him, he hit me back, and then everything was fine. We went out for ice cream after.”

“The thought of not having a chance to kiss me again made you throw yourself off a roof. I should be more careful. I know the effect I can have on women.”

“I couldn't decide if I was more offended that people thought I was the kind of person who would kill myself over a boyfriend or that I was apparently too stupid to know how to do it right.”

“I still think it's a wonderful world.”

“Looks to me like you need help. Do you know that you're wearing Thursday panties and today's Monday?”

“Besides, I thought it was kind of cool that you noticed I have good dexterity." he waved his fingers in front of my face. "I like the idea of you thinking about what my hands can do." He winked before turning to leave. I flushed even redder. "I wasn't thinking about your hands," I called after him."Sure you weren't.""I wasn't. I was trying to be nice."Drew turned around to face me, leaning against the doorjamb. "Admit it. you're thinking about it now." He saluted and left.I kicked the cart Darn it. Now I was thinking about it.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you do something embarrassing like fall down the stairs in front of a group of people, you are required to act like you are fine, even if you aren't. Your arm could have a bone jutting out, and you would still try to laugh it off as if everything were hunky dory. This compound fracture? It's nothing! I like to let my bones out of my body once in a while for fresh air. It's good for them.”

“Mr. Winston and I had already discussed:How what I'd done was vile and on par with kicking disabled kittens.That I was on the path to becoming a criminal and likely would spend the rest of my life in jail giving myself homemade tattoos with a needle and Bic pen.That the statue was a work of art, and would I dare to ear the arm off the Mona Lisa? He didn't think so.That I was a disappointment to him, my family, my boyfriend, my fellow students, and likely all of Western civilization.”

“If someone were crushed to death trying to get a frosty can of Diet Coke, it wouldn't be my fault. I'd tried to raise the issue.”

“As a matter of fact, there was a rule. If he wanted the Save the Crotch letter, then there was going to be an official vote.”