Save Yourself

To kill was to be doomed. To kill was to die, yourself.

The store was filled with hollow-eyed people standing in line: at the sandwich counter, at the soda fountain, at the register. All of them waiting, waiting, their hands full of candy, chips, cups of coffee, money. It was like purgatory, with snacks. Not just the customers; the employees, too. They worked the registers, squirted ketchup on hot dogs, piled limp lettuce onto flaccid lunch meat and waited for it to be over, waited until they could go home.

When you love somebody, you don't just give up on them when they do bad things. You fight for them.

Hate can be just as intimate as love.

Caro, you're a pretty girl, but I'd no sooner fuck a good waitress than I'd key my own car

You couldn’t talk about the way things should be in somebody else’s family. Families were like oceans. You never knew what was under the surface, in the parts you hadn’t seen. Caro

Sex is just sex. It's everything wrapped around it that's the problem.

It's not about danger, it's about control. Keep people scared and stupid and you can make them do anything you want.

Lately, she found herself thinking about Brent a lot, and for the first time, feeling angry. Because she had been twelve years old and all she'd wanted was a safe place, and now she was twenty-five and she wanted the same thing, and life shouldn't be so fucking hard, you shouldn't have to give so fucking much.

Families were like oceans. You never knew what was under the surface, in the parts you hadn’t seen.

He did not understand her. They were not the same. The garage, the trial, the old man with his head in his hands--his mother, struggling to breathe--those things were horrors. The mess under Layla's clothes was a game and he hated her for making a part of it, for ever coming near him.

Caro needed to be important. It was boring and typical and transparent as hell, even to her, but she couldn’t turn it off any more than she could quit having arms.

This girl. This little high school kid with her stupid boots and her Addams Family wardrobe and her skin as white and floury-looking as unbaked bread. Pillsbury goth girl, just out of the can.