“It felt like life had thrown a pie right in my face. And that pie was full of bricks.”

“What can you do?" he asked.It took me a few seconds to catch up to Daddy's question. He was asking about my snazzy new vampire powers, not expressing helplessness about my being turned by a guy with "shoves trees on people" tendencies."Oh, um, a lot of stuff, except, you know, eat solid food and go outside during the day, " I said. "Even my pot pie?" Mama cried. Yes, because in this situation, pot pie was what we should be focusing on.”

“He’s practically stalking me. He just won’t let it go. He’s just being … he’s being a jackass with a flaky jackass crust and a delicious jackass filling.”“So he’s jackass pie?”

“The two of them shared a look over my head. Gabriel made several threatening faces. Dick responded with rude gestures. Eventually, they looked like two inebriated mimes having a dance off.”

“I was shameless in my supermarket-shelf mass-market taste. I loved King, Evanovich, Grisham and Brown. I won't lie; the oficial-looking filing cabinet in the corner is actually stuffed full of my paperbacks.”

“You're right, it was a bad phone," I said, lifting an eyebrow. "Look at it, lying there, all superior. The phone had it coming.”

“Instead of celebrating with a cake (too full of poisonous refined sugars) and presents (too materialistic), my mother would come into my room at exactly 3:57 A.M. to tell me the story of my miraculous emergence into this world, as if it was some fairy tale. Although I supposed few fairy tales involved the words 'vaginal flowering'.”