Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

Kevin didn’t want a Porsche. Let’s not pretend. No kid wanted a Porsche.

Kevin knew exactly what buttons to push. “Why would I want to be like the two of you?” He made a mean face. “So I can be miserable?” He thumped a fist dramatically against his skinny chest. “So I can raise a good-for-nothing freak of nature who’ll just break my heart?”

Any clown could make people laugh. But this was a terrible new ability. He had the power to

make his mother cry. It wasn’t much of a superpower, but it was a start.

The problem with being a teenager is that parents could be so calm. The prospect of a whole career occurred to him. This was acting.

He was holding himself hostage.

Despite what godless liberal progressives preached, the good people of this nation could make a difference. Every cent they earned was going to help make Whale Jr. a raving pussy hound.

Kevin hoped God graded on a curve.

Jasper whispered, “I hope we get to wear a condom. My sperm could eat through steel.

While they’d tied their neckties and shined their shoes, the girl’s name had haunted them.

Life was already too full of people you met only once.

The brutal size of the money stuck in his head.

he was still young, and the pain of other people embarrassed him.

An unknown amount of night passed before either of them spoke.

Troublemaker whispered back, “The key to a fertile imagination is filling your mind with bullshit.”

Because in every movie I’ve ever seen the queer is either the chickenshit victim, or she’s the psycho super villain. I want you to know that the hero of this story is going to be a dyke.”

He was sixteen years old, and he’d wasted his entire life.

In that way, they spoke her into a legend. They took her out to sit on the basketball court, sunny days. They included her in everything.

She stared into space, trembling, like she’d sat in an electric chair that had only executed her courage.

Kevin sensed that, for the rest of his life, he would be rushing and striving. For now he could relax.

He didn’t wish time away, nor did he long to be someplace else. His life was no longer a race into the future.

the nature of happiness is that we only recognize it after the fact.

despised Troublemaker, Kidney Bean only wanted to be despicable. Until the world welcomed Troublemaker, none of them—not Tomas or Jasper, Pig the Pirate or Brainerd—wanted to be accepted.

wrapped in shiny paper printed with snowflakes by sweatshop slave laborers in some country where they’d never heard of winter,

how Devon and people like him, really everyone she knew, would gobble down meat by-product snacks processed on some grimy assembly line by Third World lepers who never bothered to wash their hands.

that doesn’t look worth getting fat over.”

He only pretended to not despise girls.

The first thing they taught him in criminology was that people were all deviants.

Just looking at the portrait made Miley feel cursed.