“We stare at each other pop-eyed over the burlap sack and laugh as if we're afraid to stop. Somebody needs to say the magical, abracadabrical words that will turn tonight's crime into a joke. Marta has buttoned her wet sweater up to her neck. Petey's vanished. Now Raffy swirls the flashlights with true panic. Our joke keeps hatching and waddling forward in a snaky black procession, growing longer and less funny by the second, and this time nobody, not even Raffy, knows the punch line.”

“Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his "ifs" into "whens".”

“This is the best night of my life," Raffy says, crying."Raffy, half our House has burnt down," I say wearily. "We don't have a kitchen.""Why do you always have to be so pessimistic?" she asks. "We can double up in our rooms and have a barbecue every night like the Cadets."Silently I vow to keep Raffy around for the rest of my life.”

“If you try a joke a second time and nobody laughs, don’t tell a different joke—tell different people.”

“It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.”

“We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.”