“The room I got is best described as being a glorified closet. It was like four times worse than what they gave you here at Burnstone Grove. The twin bed looked like some little kid had died on it. It was made up with these totally sad, urine-yellow sheets, a moth eaten comforter, and a pillow that was about as fluffy as a folded dishrag. The mattress was lumpy and smelled like pets and weather.”

“There were grandfather clocks and these things that were sort like half-grandfather clocks, and so many cuckoo clocks I suddenly felt like I was trapped in some weird pop-up book for little kids. It scared me so bad I just about had a stroke. That would have been pretty pathetic to die of a stroke at sixteen. Behind me there was this one particular cuckoo clock that looked about three thousand years old. This thing flew through the clock’s doors, and before I even realized what had happened, my hand shot up and broke it off. When I opened my hand, I was holding this totally deformed, premature-looking half chicken. It was maybe the evilest thing I’d ever seen in my life. For some reason I started kind of choking it. Now, I know that’s almost serial-killer nuts or whatever, and I’m not asking you to try to understand – I swear I’m not – but that’s what I did. I choked the thing between my thumb and forefinger as if my life depended on it.”

“When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There’s nothing stranger than the smell of someone else’s house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary’s house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.”

“For some reason, I kept trying to see how much pubic hair he had. It was all matted and kind of orange, like something you use to scrub soap scum. When he caught me looking, he told me that the landlord on the show – Mr. Furley or whatever his name was – didn’t try hard enough. “That guy doesn’t try hard enough, Steve,” he said. I felt weirdly ashamed when he said that. So much so that I went into his room and urinated on his bed.”

“I have to admit, for a second it was sort of turning me on, because I kept imagining Georgia in a very positive light. She was donning designer swimwear with fringe or whatever and she was lying on her stomach with the bikini-top straps untied. I was lathering her up with sun block and my hands were getting into all the cracks and crevices. The image got me pretty excited, and before I knew it, I had an erection. At first I thought it would go away, but it kept getting worse, like harder in that painful way. So that’s when I did something a little weird – I started barking at it. Like a Great Dane or a pit bull or whatever. I literally barked at my erection! And it worked, I’m not kidding.”

“My dad smelled sort of like mustard, which is probably due to the fact that in the bed I also discovered a thing of Hellmann’s. I wanted to grab it and squirt it in his eyes, but I couldn’t reach it.”

“And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother’s head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I’ve heard about that – how you wake up one day and there’s like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.”