“She should have a ride named after her at Epcot, man.”

“What's your name?""Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?""Wanted.""By all the girls or just the law?”

“A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore and extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she'd grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook.”

“She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.”

“As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.”

“She died in a fire. I miss her like you... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.”

“She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?”