“I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back.”

“He continues to smile expectantly. I take a step back. I don't want to catch whatever he has. He is a disturbing out-of-uniform Santa.”

“I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.”

“When I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right next to me like a real best friend, watching, and smiling, and wishing he had a mouth.”

“As I sat on the midnight PVTA bus to Amherst, I scanned the male faces, looking for a potential boyfriend. My standards were high: anyone who looked back at me.”

“Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”

“I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind--an emptiness--a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn't even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.”