“Mrs. Leene says I should think about people in the present tense. “It forces you to take responsibility for them,” she says.”

“There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper. A little beef and bingo at the Nugents’.”

“We only have so much time, Mary,” I remember saying. “Time will kill you – it really will.”

“I sat there for a moment and thought about my mom. It was her groans of pain that would get me the most. Sometimes they didn’t even sound human. Sometimes she sounded like a cow, and for some weird reason, that made me think about hamburgers and I suddenly realized how starved I was.”

“So I think I’m in love with Silent Starla, who isn’t all that silent after all. In group she hardly ever talks, and in the cafeteria she just sort of stares off in this dreamy way. She’s from Oak Park, Illinois, and when she left my room, she said, “We can go together, but I won’t fuck you without a condom. I like your eyes.”

“And then all of a sudden I realized how little time we have. Like on the earth, I mean. And when I say we, I mean everyone. It was a profound realization, and I suddenly had to share this fact with Mary. I know that sounds insane because of how it was already after midnight and all the other crazy things that had happened that day, but it was one of the most important feelings I’ve ever had – my chest was swelling and everything. It felt like there were only so many hours left on the earth – that’s the hardest part about being alive.”

“That’s when I started doing the Our Father again. I have no idea why. It just sort of poured out of me. And I recited it way too fast, like there was some sort of creepy priest in the back seat trying to damn me or something. But when I got to the part about the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, I said the Kingdom, the Power and the Gory. I even repeated the line, knowing that I was making a mistake, but Gory just kept coming out. It felt like someone else was making me say it, which is a pretty frightening situation when you’re all alone and you’ve just hijacked your parents’ car.”