“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’.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky”