Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

I envied Victor’s certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief – that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols – as if evil were a code that could be cracked.

We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm.

That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains.

A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn’t even need a tragedy.

Peter never wore underwear, Connie had complained, and the fact grew in my mind, making me nauseous in a not unpleasant way. The sleepy crease of his eyes from his permanent high. Connie paled in comparison: I didn’t really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you.

She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn’t fun, it was interesting, and wasn’t that valuable, didn’t that mean something?

This is what it might be like to be a mother, I though, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere.

How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved.