“I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling - it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.”

“I wanted to wrap that moment up in tissue paper and save it forever someplace near my heart, just so I could take it out and look at it when the world was too harsh. The beautiful drunk boy in the pillow fort in my living room telling me I was exquisite.”

“I’m so jealous,” she whispered, and he blinked.“Of what?”Her head fell back on the pillow, and she stared up at the ceiling with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.“You’re so alive, Lore. There’s fire in you. A will to live, when all I want is to be done with this life.”

“And you look beautiful," she added."I look like a cake.""But a beautiful cake.”

“I don't want to change the world," she kept saying. "I just want to change one corner of it. If I reach a few of the kids I look after, just a few, that will be enough for me.”

“When I went to college, I lived on campus, and the guys I hung out with made the characters in Revenge of the Nerds look like the Rat Pack in 1962. I, myself made that kid Booger look like Remington Steele.”