“She stared at him. His eyes were glazed, glassy, blazing with triumph behind his glasses, and as his lip curled in a sneer, she felt it happen. Her love for him—whatever shred of it was left—was gone. It had slunk away into the night. It would die out there, and she would not be sorry to leave it, at the side of the road, in a no-name town surrounded by nothing but blackness. Quietly, she said, “Knew what, exactly?” He licked his lips. “I knew you’d never turn into such a whore without a little help.” “Good-bye.” The word was out, and she was gone.”

“There was not supposed to be blood on the road. That girl, dead and gone, her spirit trapped forever just inside town limits-- she'd come from someplace, was going somewhere. Until destiny had stepped into the road in front of her, stopped her forward motion, drawn a killing claw across the white, fluttering swell of her future. Whispering, "Oh no, you don't." When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.”

“That girl, dead and gone, her spirit trapped forever just inside town limits—she'd come from someplace, was going somewhere. Until destiny had stepped into the road in front of her, stopped her forward motion, drawn a killing claw against the white, fluttering swell of her future. Whispering, 'Oh no, you don't.'When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.”

“Once upon a time, the great big world outside Bridgeton had seemed like Xanadu - miles of golden road lined with smiling people, waiting to usher me through hundreds of open doors. There was nothing out there but bright light and possibilities. There were big dreams of other places, other people, even other boys.There had even, for two hours in April, been somebody else.He was a glimpse of the future, where I would live and breath and love far, far away from this place. A future where behind a closed door, on Saturday mornings, a boy I hadn't met yet would wrap an arm around my waist and exhale damp heat into the curve of my neck. Where we would keep our eyes closed, pull the covers closer, burrow down and deeper to escape the nine-o'clock sunshine, and the sound of heavy breath echoing along the rusted steel confines of a pickup truck would be nothing but a memory.”

“I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else... or maybe it was only a dream.”

“She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath.”

“Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air—tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware.”