“The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up.There was a thing in it.The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand...but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid.A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door, and gone.”

“I could envision it all to clearly: Stuart or Debbie finding the dented door off its hinges, lying in the snow. "She came in, ravaged the boy, stole plastic bags, and ripped off the door in her escape," the police would say in the APB. "Probably making her way to bust her parents out of jail.”

“This kind of thing always amazed Ginny--people who just walked away from institutions. People who left school when they didn't see the point. Aunt Peg had done that. Ginny knew she never would. That either made her someone who worked hard and finished things, or someone who didn't have the guts to break away from the pack. Maybe both.”

“She didn't even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that--impossible as it seemed--it was a fox.”

“He had let Aunt Peg live in his house and married her, so clearly he had a thing for flaky American types who liked to sneak off in the dead of night. That was, as Ginny remembered it, how America won the Revolution in the first place. The English walked around in bright red coats in straight lines and took breaks for tea, and the Americans snuck around dressed in rags and hid in trees and stole their horses. Or something. Whatever. She had to do this-it was her birthright. It was what George Washington would have wanted.”

“We heard her come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on. Again, the normal parent reaction would have been to say something like, "You had better come out this moment or I am releasing the tiger!" But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her gigle and creep away, saying, "Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy!”

“She's gone. Been gone for ages. They split up right after you left. That's why the grass out front started growing again.""He's got a new girlfriend?" she said quietly. "Thank god. You must be happy.""Yeah. He does. It's a relief. She's a lot nicer. But then, your average angry snake is nicer than Fiona. I'm sure she's happier wherever she is now, burning orphans or whatever she does with her time.”