“We’ve been out of the closet for about 40 years.’ His lips parted. ‘Out of the closet?’ A grin came over my face. ‘Sorry, we came clean, uh, we told them we existed after a virus hiding in tomatoes, a sort of a plague, started killing humans. It dropped their numbers by about a quarter. They were going to find out about us anyway because we weren’t dying.’ Pierce watched my moving foot and smiled with half his face. ‘I’ve always been of the mind that tomatoes were the fruit of the devil’, he said.”

“I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the “half closet.”

“Yeah whatever," Andrew said impatiently. "He came back to the room that night and kept talking about this girl he'd seen at the stargazing. He was shy, and so I told him if he pointed you out, I'd try to finagle a meeting." I swear, Andrew's the only person in the world who could use a word like finagle with a straight face. "But he was talking about me," I said. Andrew shrugged. "When we figured it out, we had a good laugh about it," he said defensively. "But of course you were my girlfriend. So that was that.”

“Sorry about Bender," Lula said, letting the Trans Am idle at the curb. "Maybe we could tell Vinnie he died. We could say we were all set to bring Bender in, and he died. Bang. Dead as a doorknob.""Better yet, why don't we just go back and kill him," I said. I opened the door to leave, caught my toe in the floor mat, and fell out of the car, face first. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the stars. "I'm fine," I said to Lula. "Maybe I'll sleep here tonight.”

“dated when we were sophomores and we've been hooking up occasionally ever since. But we came out here and I was going to end it." she just said it's over, okay? So that's it. It's over. I'm not cheating.”

“Well, thank you kindly, pretty lady," Max said, twisting his mouth into a grin... He blinked. "Wow, that came out creepier than I was expecting. Sorry about that.”