I hadn’t expected to think pro wrestling was a form of art. I hadn’t expected infidelity to be about cuddling or drug addiction to be about eating Milky Ways.

There was no changing Mark. Or Jinx, or Shyanne, or how the world worked. They were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move or how it’d be fairer if they moved a different way. You had to adapt.

What she liked most about sex was that feeling of all the normal posturing and social rules falling away, the giddy panic of realizing you’ve lost control and you’re not getting it back. Instead, you’re just helplessly writhing, victim of an ancient itch. Then it’s over, and one of you gets up to go to the bathroom and pulls on their underwear, and

The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.

“Why do you think it changed?” I asked. “Like, civilization?” “I don’t know what a historian would say, but I would say Jesus: love thy neighbor, and it’s easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than a rich man to get into heaven. In a place like Rome, insisting everyone had intrinsic value—it rattled them. I mean, they killed him for it.”

She drank a blue Gatorade, cold dark blood of the gods,

The fakeness is where the interest lies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real.”

He was a wind chime in human form, dangling dorkily from the glorious tree of higher education.

would choke these things down with the same worried expression as a dog who’s been given a carrot.