"Saying I can make it better doesn't work. I've tried. But I want to make it better, and I want her to believe that I can, and I just don't want to be alone, like I am right now, thinking even if I sent a message to Gemma and she didn't respond, it would feel better than swallowing all these words."

"You don't think I can do it, do you? I said. Au contraire, you turd. I rose to my feet, and Speedo gave me a holler from down below.

​

The thing about friends is that they know how to speak your language."

"And it’s this thought, the one where god wears a hard hat and studies the blueprint to this world, scratching at a temple, that brings me a little peace. This god who struggles with calculus and feels insecure about the appropriate amount of cookies to eat after dinner. It can’t be just one but is three too much? God thinks, depends on the size."

"Peep was seven, an age at which a lack of self-awareness encouraged his soft temperament. Looking at him then, Lakey knew he was, in all her estimations, bound to be crippled by a cruel world."

"I watch my lie run its course on these people. I wonder if they're really my friends."

"Did he know that the Institute had just forked out three quarters of a million for the three-child portrait he stared at—the sole product of an Argentine modernist whose life had been cut short after jumping into the Rio de la Plata and getting hit by a tugboat? He did not. Kiryl simply drew circles the size of dimes for eyes, bolded three separate pairs of black pupils, careful not to puncture the canvas."

"His chestnut skin is smooth from the youth that remains in him, but on his face there are clef notes of pain. He stares at the sky and mouths all the words he has straight up.

​

Did his words rise fast enought to save him?"