“The demon stopped its frantic attempts to escape. It stared at the glitter and began to pant, fingers twitching in anticipation. More twitching. Faster than she'd expected, it zoomed up to the sparkles, despite the danger. She snagged the fiend right before it picked up the last one, and dropped the Magpie into the cup. Instead of a flood of swear words or the offer of a favor, she heard a long, tortured sigh. Then it sat, sorting the glitter into piles by color.Now she'd seen everything.”

“As more kids piled on and the bus started up, she stared out the window at the place where she'd done so much growing up. When she'd first come to camp, she couldn't believe she was setting foot on Camp Lakeview, or any camp grounds at all, for that matter. Now she couldn't believe she was leaving.”

“Riley found her friend studying the contents of one of the store's display windows. It was full of sparkle. “How do you catch this thing?” he asked.She dug in her bag, pulled out a sippy cup, and handed it to him.“You're joking, right?” he said. “You trap demons with cups that have dancing bears on them?”She glowered at him. “See the glitter in the bottom? Klepto-Fiends can't resist it.”He held up the sippy cup and compared it to the exquisitely cut diamonds in the store window.“Wanna bet?”And I brought him along why?”

“ Put your other goddamned sock on", she said. Instead, he took the first sock off. They stared at each other. It was so spectacularly absurd. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitching; she was close to laughing. Rory had used to do the same sort of thing; she'd spent a decade of her life being mollified by simple existential charm. ”

“It began with the twitch of her lower lip as it took on a life of its own, rippling outward to the corners of her mouth and forcing them upward into a helpless smile. She instantly clasped one hand over her mouth in a frantic attempt to silence the sound that was coming from her throat. The result was that she half-spluttered, half-coughed, her eyes painfully wide as she desperately wished a hole would emerge in the oriental carpet and mercifully swallow her up.”

“She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a totally inappropriate person. She'd really work on it, but abandon would be involved as well. She'd have different names, a.k.a. Snake, a.k.a. Snow - no that was juvenile. She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.”