“The kitchen was bright, cheerful yellow, the walls decorated with framed chalk and pencil sketches Simon and Rebecca had done in grade school. Rebecca had some drawing talent, you could tell, but Simon's sketches of people all looked like parking meters with tufts of hair.”

“Simon had drawn three pictures. In the top left corner, like a salutation, was a ghost. The middle had a big sketch of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. The third in place of a signature, was a lightning bolt surrounded by fog. Beside the drawing, someone had scrawled in inch-high letters 10 A.M.Tori snatched it from me and turned it over. "So where's the message?""Right there." I pointed from picture to picture. "It says: Chloe, I'll be back, Simon.”

“Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color,everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn'tquite comic book.”

“She told me to draw the curtains shut, so I grabbed my pencil and began to sketch.”

“Said Hamlet to Ophelia,I'll draw a sketch of thee.What kind of pencil shall I use?2B or not 2B?”

“A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.”