“I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. 'I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,' people would say, and my rage would renew itself.”

“His embarassment would have pleased me, but once he recovered, there would be that awkward period that sometimes culminates in a handshake. I didn't want to touch these people's hands or see things from their point of view, I just wanted to continue hating them. So I kept my mouth shut and stared off into space.”

“Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, 'I'm in love. Can you believe it? I'm finally, totally in love, and I feel great.”

“There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been written by different people.”

“Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.”

“He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!”

“A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.”