“A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her I can see why he would want to stay home when he's got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor.”

“I understand, given her track record, "I should use a first and last name-- maybe even the last four digits of their social security number-- when making a reference to one of her boyfriends.”

“He wanted to do things to this woman. He wanted to make her feel the way a good boyfriend would – desired, wanted, craved. She deserved all that. He could give it to her now. He could give it to her for a week.”

“You know, hon, after Stephie died, we never really talked about her." she says, her hands tight around the cart handle. "There's a lot of pain there. Still. I guess we feel like we failed her. Like maybe if we were home instead of away at college, we could've done something to fix her. Something my patents and the doctors and her boyfriend missed. Sometimes I think I don't have the right to talk about her. Like at the end, I don't know her well enough to say anything. So much of her life became secret. She spent all of her time with her boyfriend, and when she was home, her nose was buried in her diary. I swear that diary was her best friend, even more than Megan.""Did you ever read it?" I ask."No.""Not even after she died?"Aunt Rachel shakes her head, removing an eggplant from the middle row and pressing her fingers against its flesh. "To this day, I don't know if I would've, either. We never found it, Delilah. It's like she just…took it with her.”

“Her name was Bullwinkle. We called her that because she had a face like a moose. But Tommy, even though he could get any girl he wanted on the Sunset Strip, would not break up with her. He loved her and wanted to marry her, he kept telling us, because she could spray her cum across the room.”

“Jess actually dreaded having a boyfriend, because of having to tell her mum. Perhaps she would just avoid it until her mum eighty or something and in an old-people's home, and then Jess, who would by then be about fifty, would drop by and casually remark, "Oh, by the way, Mum, I've got a boyfriend." And even then her mum would probebly hurtle out of her wheelchair and smack her hard across the face, crying "You trash! You whore! Get outta my house--I mean, my room!" It was hard sometimes, being the daughter of a radical feminist who hated men. ”