Why would you listen to sad things when you’re already sad?” “I dunno.” Hai drew circles in the pavement. “Guess it gives the feeling a place to stand in. Like a little bus stop.”

“You’re—” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.” “Oh—oh, you mean LGBT?” He wiped his eyes and let out a single disbelieving laugh. She shrugged. “Yeah, I’m a liggabit.” “A liggabit soldier,” she said, her head slipping to the side. “Must be rare.”

Everything’s a room, he realized, too late. The cars on the interstate nothing but rooms with wheels. The endless prescription bottles. And the body, too, a room, and so is the heart. So is the cell in the blood spilling back to the world, only to be contained by more world, which keeps even the atoms that make up the Styrofoam cups and trays sloug

“With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated. You know what underrated means, right?” “More than what the Lord planned,” she said. “Yes. And we were very

“You believe in God, boy?” He took a long drag and considered this. “He’s probably around sometimes.” “Clearly not as much as the devil,” she cackled, her missing front tooth winking behind the smoke.

The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible.

“You know what my favorite kind of light is?” Hai said after a while, chewing and staring at the Sgt. Pepper’s sign. “What kind?” said BJ. “The one that comes from a microwave left open in a dark room.” “Say again?” BJ looked at him over her pizza. “I can’t explain it. But it’s the kind of light that makes you think about people. You feel both lost

“They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we ca

Chester County, where the towns are so small you could light a cigarette as you drive in and be someplace else before you blow your first drag out the window.