“I'll remind her of how fat her arms looked in that slutty dress she wore at senior prom. That always makes her cry. Like goddamned Niagara falls.”

“She wore too much eyeliner then, at age thirteen, and now, at eighteen, she wears so much black under her eyes, she looks like a slutty linebacker raccoon.”

“Whenever I'm out late she makes a sandwich for my school lunch. I always protest and tell her not to, saying I'll make my own when I get home. But she likes it. She says it reminds her of when I was younger and needed her.”

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”

“And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.”

“She wore a cantilevered, augmented-breast-skimming satin dress the colour of egg-yolk. Somewhere in deepest Nebraska, a prom queen two sizes smaller than Selena was wondering where the fuck her outfit had disappeared to.”