“My mother hid the knife block.”

“We were in a pit. Fitting. This was, after all, my hell. This pit around the lake. The lake that had taken so much. My friendship with Decker. My humanity. Quite nearly my life. And I was so angry with it. I wasn't scared anymore. I was furious.”

“I leaned against my door, struggling to catch my breath, and thought that maybe hell wasn't a place at all, but a thing. A contagious thing. A thing that could creep up the steps, seep through the crack under my door, grow horns and sprout fire - smelling faintly like sulfur. A thing that could sink its tendrils inside and take root, coloring everything gray and distorting a smile into a sneer. And while i got dressed for the play, swatted at my back and kept running my hands over my stomach because I could feel it, I swear, I could feel it reaching for me, trying to grab hold.”

“My brain scrambled to make room for the existene of these people. Grandparents I'd never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.Kind of like me.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" he said.I placed my hands flat on the table and leaned across it. "Stay the hell away from him.""Who? Oh, you mean the guy who's gonna bite it soon?" "He's not. He's going to be fine."He reached a hand out and placed it over my own. I snatched my hand back. He shook his head at me and whispered, "You can't stop it.""Watch me.”

“I wasn't sure who I was most scared of at the moment. The stranger I was learning about too quickly, or the woman I'd known my entire life that was quickly becoming a stranger.”

“I knew how I was supposed to feel when I was with him. Well, I knew what I was not supposed to feel. I wasn't supposed to feel anxious. Not tense, either. Or maybe I was. Maybe this was normal. I didn't know. So I let him whisper in my ear and put his hands on my hips. And I listened to him list the ways in which I was slowly killing him. None of which turned out to be the actual way that I killed him.”