“- I like my shirts.- It's plaid.- There are no rules for shirts. Plaid is good.- Plaid is bad. Although, if you went with a Scottish plaid in wool, it might be okay.- I'm not dressing like some damned highlander, Mercedes.- And the lumberjack look is okay?- You don't like my shirt?”

“The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.”

“By the time she yanked on her old jeans and a battered plaid flannel shirt, she felt almost normal. Calm, as she plugged in the coffee pot. But the nightmare was still very much on her mind, because it wasn’t a dream…It was a memory.”

“I tugged at the hem of my brand-new Hecate Hall issue blue plaid skirt (Kilt? Some sort of bizarre skirt/kilt hybrid? A skilt?)”

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”

“You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.”