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The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.
Even in the heat, that running felt good—hand in hand, all out, a group of shirtless monsters just behind us.
The whole thing again fizzling around us both, around our closeness, like a just-lit sparkler, and I didn’t know what to say back.
the stuff I didn’t know seemed like it would come easy enough if I could just wait for it, and anyway there’d always be Irene with me, waiting too.
Mom and Dad don’t know about us. They don’t know, so we’re safe—even though there was no more Mom and Dad to know about anything.
How, if my parents were dead, could there still be some part of me that felt relief at not being found out?
her only grandchild a now-orphaned shoplifter, a girl who kissed girls, and she didn’t even know,
I asked, unaware that this was the first official time of so many to come when I’d receive the prorated orphan discount.
one where she was giddily unaware that she was just hours away from escaping a tragedy—and a lifetime away from a day that tragedy would find her anyway.
all those times, no matter what the occasion, it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony, like I was playing at a relationship with God, just like any little kid playing house or grocery store or anything else, but not like it was real.
I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals, and that its messages came in Technicolor and musical montages and fades and jump cuts and silver-screen legends and B-movie nobodies and villains to root for and good guys to hate. But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.
his arms stretched wide, somehow reminding me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all.
Those strips of light illuminated the thick dust that the boys had stirred in their play, and its slow descent back to the ground, like glitter, like snowflakes, made everything just a little dreamy and unreal.
It felt like we’d entered a world that wasn’t supposed to be found this way. I liked it.
I hadn’t really fallen in love with Lindsey, and she hadn’t with me; but we were okay with that, and liked each other maybe more for it.
How could I pretend to be a victim when I was so willing to sin?
