“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.”

“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.”

“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’.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”