“Virgin, right?" the voice asks again. It comes from the tall one with white-blond hair falling into his eyes. Frankie is still giggling, and my entire body goes hot and red, despite the chill in the water. If Frankie thinks she's just going to auction me off, well ... I don't know. It's kind of hard to be witty when you're trying to call forth a giant sea squid to swallow you up and drag you down to the depths of the ocean floor, never to be seen, heard from, or mocked again.”

“Where is Frankie, anyway?" Dad asks. "It's almost noon. I'm surprised you two can stand the separation."I take a deep breath and gulp down some orange juice.Well, Dad, first Frankie lied to me about losing her virginity to the foreign exchange student on the soccer field, and how your first time can't be special and all that. Then we decided to have this twenty boy contest but we only met, like, half, and she lied again about sleeping with one of them when really they just kind of fooled around naked and broke up. Meanwhile, when I was casting off my virginity with boy number five (or was he six?), Frankie read my journal and found out that I was in love with Matt for a million years and by the way, right after you took that picture of us with all the cake and frosting, he kissed me and started this whole long thing that we weren't allowed to tell her about. Frankie was so mad that she threw my journal into the bottom of the ocean, where it was banished for all eternity with a lovesick mermaid who cries out pieces of sea glass. Are you going to eat that bacon?..."I'll probably see her later," I say.”

“Samuel didn't move. 'What will you do if I climb off the bed?''Well I can eat you, or I can drag you down to the depths of Hell, never to seen or heard from again. Depends, really.''On what?''Lost of things: hygiene, for a start. After tasting that sock, I don't fancy eating any part of you, to be honest, so it'll have to be the depths of Hell for you, I'm afraid.”

“Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me — hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know." She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. Look, it's hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”

“Come on," I said. "You think you're going to ask the wrong question and--what?--the Spencers are going to make you disappear?""I can't rule it out," she said."Actually, I think you can.""We'll see. I'll call you after, let you know how it goes. If you don't hear from me, well, you do what you think is right. If I disappear, maybe you can find me."Her voice had turned careless and light, but I thought I could still hear an undertone of gravity in it."If you can't find me," she said, "I wouldn't mind being avenged.(p159)”

“Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on.”