“Girl surrounded by flowersTechnicolor kissFor all the night's lengthy hoursI'll miss...”

“Taylor clapped three times for attention. "Ladies! Ladies! My stars! That's enough. Now. We all know Miss Arkansas's girls are fake, Miss Ohio's easier than making cereal, and Miss Montana's dress is something my blind meemaw would wear to bingo night."- "Beauty Queens”

“Her morning bus was due to arrive any minute, if she hadn’t already missed it. But Sascha was the type of girl who heard incidental music when she walked, and the score surrounding this timid, old cat was much more alluring than the dreary notes surrounding her bus ride.”

“The missing girl—there had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious, then a quick cut to the worried parents on the front lawn, microphones surrounding them, Mom silently tearful, Dad reading a statement with quivering lip—that girl, that missing girl had just walked past Edna Skylar.”

“There used to be two of us always on the look-out for life, talking to Miss Blossom at night, wondering, hoping; two Bronte-Jane Austen girls, poor but spirited, two Girls of Godsend Castle.”

“How did that go?’ he asked. ‘Your first lengthy conversation with a girl your own age?’‘Fabulous,’ said Artemis, voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘We’re planning a June wedding.”