“Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”

“here’s the sick, twisted thing: part of me thinks i deserve this. that maybe if i wasn’t such an asshole, isaac would have been real. if i wasn’t such a lame excuse for a person, something right might happen to me. it’s not fair, because i didn’t ask for dad to leave, and i didn’t ask to be depressed, and i didn’t ask for us to have no money, and i didn’t ask to want to fuck boys, and i didn’t ask to be so stupid, and i didn’t ask to have no real friends, and i didn’t ask to have half the shit that comes out of my mouth come out of my mouth. all i wanted was one fucking break, one idiotic good thing, and that was clearly too much to ask for, too much to want.”

“I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this at all. I had been worried about Al trashing a bar. What if he showed up here amid Cincy’s finest citizens and its most helpless orphans? I’d be lynched.”

“I . . . Why do you want me to?” There was a flicker of something in Greta’s look. I couldn’t tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, “Why wouldn’t I want you to?” Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn’t say it.”

“This is the strongest I have ever wanted a family. Other people to worry with. I am the only person worrying for her and it feels to me like this diminishes her odds of recovery. To have many people praying for you suddenly seems like a necessary thing and I consider telling the woman next to me what is happening, if only to have another person thinking about my Mom.”

“And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn’t see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn’t believe there was anything they could do, not knowing—or not wanting to know—that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.”