“She’s calling our house. What ten-year-old girl needs to call a boy’s house? A slutty ten-year-old girl, that’s who. She’s got her sights on our son, and before we know it, she’s going to be giving him blow jobs on the back of the bus and forcing him to watch porn with her. This is our BABY, Carter!”

“She’s an old lady,” Barron says. “And she’s been locked up for years. Let her have some fun. She needs to blow off steam. Seduce old dudes. Lose money at canasta.”

“When we fall that first time, we’re not really inlove with the girl. We’re in love with being in love. We’ve got no idea what she’s really about—or what she’s capable of. We’re in love with our idea of her andof who we become around her. We’re idiots.”

“She’s their secret weapon! They call her Trasha, and she’s eight years old. I hear they discovered her at the Pacific Mall arcade, playing Drum-Mania. She has so much A.D.D., it’s not even funny.”

“Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.”

“Don’t call a girl a flirt, she’s just trying to be nice. Don’t call a girl obsessed when she’s just in love.”