“The truth was that she had managed to betray everyone by doing nothing. No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong. Not cheating on a non-boyfriend with the non-boyfriend of a friend. The pressure of thinking that one through made her swollen body ache.”

“No one in history had ever done less and yet been so wrong.”

“It was a bit on the frantic side, maybe because neither one of us had done the metal preparation, so we were both thinking, Oh, right! Kissing! Quickly! Quickly! More movement! Deploy tongue!”

“After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.”

“She introduced herself to my parents with one of her mighty, bunny-crushing handshakes. (I'd never seen Claudia crush a bunny, to be fair, but that's the approximate level of pressure.)”

“I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”

“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.”