“What’s that?” she asked the girl, wrinkling her nose.“Oh, that? That’s just Pillover.”“And what’s a pillover, when it’s at home?”“My little brother.”“Ah, I commiserate. I have several of my own. Dashed inconvenient, brothers.”

“That’s writing, I suppose—dozens of decisions about what’s in, what’s out, what goes with what, what’s clever but not honest, what’s so honest that it’s a truism, what’s meretricious—and all just to produce one short sketch.”

“They’d just left when Zsadist came in at a dead run. “Shit, shit, shit…”What’s doing, my brother?”“I’m teaching and I’m late.”Zsadist grabbed a sleeve of bagels, a turkey leg out of the refridge and a quart of ice cream from the freezer. “Shit.”“That’s your breakfast?”“Shut up. It’s almost a turkey sandwich.”

“Charlotte is a prism for my life. Without her, my existence looks pale and bleak and somewhere near the middle of the suck-meter. But around her, I see clearly that my life isn’t made up of anything mediocre, but instead is some combination of the amazing and the dreadful— my brother who adores me, my parents who want what’s best for me, my brother who’s dying, my parents who won’t understand me. It’s not gray at all; it’s too painfully colorful and fantastic and awful for me to see without her help.”

“Echo, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen because I don’t know. I don’t hold hands in the halway or sit at anyone else’s lunch table. But I swear …on my brothers that you’ll never be a joke to me and you’ll be much more than a girl in the backseat of my car.”

“But the thing I notice most isn’t what’s in them—surprise, disbelief, curiosity, maybe a little pity—it’s what’s not. Judgment. Disdain. Horror. None of the things I’ve so often seen in people’s eyes when I’ve had to tell them my story.Now I want to kiss her even more.”