Remembering The Grundoon

Found a copy of my first novel, The Grundoon, this afternoon, and couldn't help myself: I read a few pages. But hey, it wasn't too bad! Here's a passage about the protagonist's relationship with his little sister:

Radkey could still remember how his mother wept when she learned that Sarah had been sentenced to the Friendswood Special Assignments Center, a notorious warehouse for the school district’s behavioral head lice. This was the perennial home-away-from-home of such problematic individuals as Martin Wepner, who liked to set fires in trash cans, and Vince Vardello, who’d tried to slash the throat of his art teacher with the sharpened edge of a Pontiac Firebird medallion when she turned down his second proposal of marriage. Sarah was fifteen. She seemed unconcerned by her new surroundings, though she admitted the bus ride was going to be a little creepier. Why are you crying? she asked her mother. I’m the one they think is a freak! Radkey figured his mother cried because she couldn’t understand what her daughter was thinking, couldn’t understand and therefore couldn’t help. Nothing ever made sense with Sarah. And so the family tried another school, a private school, but there were problems there as well, including angry letters from other parents in connection with an incident involving the distribution of psilocybin mushrooms, and then it was back to Friendswood High but that didn’t last long either, though the story line grew murky at this point.
Sarah had always been contrary. By the time Radkey left for college, she was gulping ecstasy and maybe selling it as well, sleeping out on the beach at Galveston with her friends and missing school for two and three days at a stretch. She laughed at him when he tried to lecture her—but only at the first few sentences he spoke. He’d talk to her in his softest superpower voice, like the U.S. addressing a fractious African republic. He’d urge her to get some school spirit. You know. Try out for the drill team. Or join the History Club, which he happened to know for a fact had no actual admission standards and no reason for existence other than to visit the San Jacinto Monument every April with Miss Card, spinster descendant of one of those mutton-chopped heroes of Texas independence, and moreover to allow certain individuals (him, for example! And why not her?) to list yet another extracurricular activity on their resumes for the benefit of some anonymous college application screener. But what made perfect sense to Radkey only got on his sister’s last nerve. She’d be thoroughly pissed off by the time he offered to write a recommendation for her. Sometimes she’d scream and say she hated him. Sometimes he said it back. She turned seventeen only two weeks before the evening in October when she slid off Hardy Road in her father’s car, wrapping the Volvo around a cement pillar beneath a highway overpass and losing the front of her skull to the windshield. Hardy Road lay on the east side of Houston, in a neighborhood of used car lots and cinder-block cervecerias. No one even knew what she was doing there. Given his parents’ sharp sense of propriety, Radkey figured no one had ever asked. He turned out to be wrong about this, though in the end it hardly mattered.