“In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.”

“That must have been some serious Island voodoo: the ending I saw in the cave came true. The next day we went back to the United States. Five months later I got a letter from my ex-baby. I was dating someone new, but Magda’s handwriting still blasted every molecule of air out of my lungs.It turned out she was also going out with somebody else. A very nice guy she’d met. Dominican, like me. Except he loves me, she wrote.But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to finish by showing you what kind of fool I was.When I returned to the bungalow that night, Magda was waiting up for me. Was packed, looked like she’d been bawling.I’m going home tomorrow, she said.I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.”

“I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.”

“You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.”

“If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.”

“In my universe, when a dork like Oscar pushes up on a girl like Jenni, he usually gets bounced faster than your tía Daisy's rent checks, but Jenni must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerdboys, because by the end of February she was actually treating him all civil and shit.”

“Ramfis fled the country after Trujillo's death, lived dissolutely off his father's swag, and ended up dying in a car crash of his own devising in 1969; the other car he hit contained the Duchess of Albuquerque, Teresa Beltrán de Lis, who died instantly; Lil'Fuckface went on murdering right to the end.”