No Exit

The difference between a hero and a victim? Timing.

History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but damn, it sure can rhyme.

Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.

The easiest lies to tell are the true ones.

Don’t fear the pros. The pros know what they’re doing, and do it cleanly. Fear the amateurs.

Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop.

There’s refuge in normalcy — if you can hold onto it.

Excuses are poison,” Ed repeated. “Doing the right thing is hard. Talking yourself out of it is easy.

Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea.

the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

You want to know the secret to ruining your life? It's never one big black-and-white decision. It's dozen's of little ones that you make every single day. It's excuses, in my case. Excuses are poison

You’re the sum of every trait I’ve ever hated in a human being.

Too much caffeine, not enough sleep. This wasn’t a movie. This was just real life.

Up and down lost all meaning. Her world became a violent tumble-dryer, an endless, crashing kaleidoscope.

She remembered walking back from there last month, half-drunk with a gaggle of half-friends from her dorm, and when one of them asked her (only half-giving a shit) where she’d planned to go for Christmas break, Darby had answered bluntly: that it would require an act of God Himself to make her come back home to Utah. And apparently He’d been listening, because He’d blessed Darby’s mother with late-stage pancreatic cancer.

You’re the reason Dad left us. And if I could have chosen him instead of you, I would have. In a heartbeat. In a fucking heartbeat, Maya. Before hanging up, her mother had answered: If he really wanted you, Darby, he would have taken you. She sipped her cocoa again. Lukewarm.

When you’re facing a lunch date with the Reaper, what’re a few little bones and tendons?

a piteous creature that wore so many masks, he didn’t even know what he looked like beneath them.

Then, like a levee breaking, it all came out: “I took advantage of her. I manipulated her. I called her horrible things. I stole her car once, with a shoelace. I’d leave, for days at a time, without telling her where I’d gone or who I was out with. I must have given her ulcers. When I . . . when I left for college, we didn’t even say goodbye. I just got in my Honda and drove to Boulder. I stole a bottle of her gin from the cabinet on my way out.

Tonight had been a swirling, sweaty shitstorm of blind chance and left-field surprises. Not

The time she dreamt that her throat closed up in seventh grade Social Studies class and she vomited a three-inch maggot, pale and bloated, writhing on her desk? 3: 21 a.m. The time a man stalked her on her way to 7-Eleven, whistling at her, and then cornered her in the restroom, produced a tiny handgun, and shot her in the back of the head? 3: 33 a.m. The time that tall ghost —a gray-haired woman with a floral skirt and double-jointed knees, both bending backward like a dog’s hind legs —came lurching through Darby’s bedroom window, half-floating and half-striding, weightless and ethereal, like a creature underwater? 3: 00 a.m. exactly.

I’ll hurt you even worse, Rodent Face. I’ll take your gun. Then I’ll kill Ashley with it. This girl is going home. Tonight.

She ran the wrong way.” Ashley pointed downhill with the gun. “See? Dumb bitch is going north. Deeper into the woods.

shouldn’t have given her that knife. What if, by intervening tonight, I made things worse? What if I got Jay killed?

A suspect description and a blurry, half-assed photo wouldn’t be good enough. It would be enough for the media to brand her a hero if things worked out nicely, but it wasn’t enough to guarantee Jay’s rescue.

It’s always the nice guy,” Ashley said. “Again, I don’t really read, but I’ve seen a lot of movies, and that’s even better. Whoever seems like the nicest character, at first, will always turn out to be the asshole in the end.

She backed up, past the green stalls, past paul takes it in the ass,

If you weren’t the harbinger of my death before, she thinks, you probably are now.