Leo approved of poets, generally, but it was very important not to let them get started on the subject of their work if you wanted to continue enjoying poetry.
Periodically someone would encourage her to walk through the woods or try out the mountain bike. Stevie viewed these offers with grave suspicion and declined.
Even if you knew your routine like the back of your hand, a checklist was still important.
There were for sure snakes at the camp. It was entirely made of snakes. Why hadn’t she thought of the snakes?
Anxiety is very accommodating. Minutes ago, Stevie’s anxiety was all about failure. It neatly converted itself into worry about places called Bounce Houses and not having hot water or air-conditioning. It was perfectly ready to bring the snakes to the party. It’s a big tent. All problems are welcome.
If Gertie van Coevorden had two brain cells, each would be amazed to know of the other’s existence.
No, hear me out. This whole thing is ticking a lot of the horror movie boxes. Murder at a sleepaway camp. A serial killer. A final girl. A kid who died because some teenagers were being irresponsible.
That’s the thing about speaking – you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.
He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.
Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world.
Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a shred of dignity left.
People always talk about this like it’s some lurid slasher movie,” Allison went on. “I lost my sister. Some bastard took my sister from me. I feel like Carson used her memory, gave us that reading room, to try to worm his way in. He can go to hell. But I didn’t mean to catch you in the crossfire.
They were poets – machine-gun poets who brooked no compromise, who rode any road they wished, who drove laughing into the sun.
She wasn’t as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim.
She’s like the Hulk,” Nate explained. “But instead of transforming when she gets mad, it’s when she sees crafts. And she doesn’t turn big and green. She just makes crafts. So not like the Hulk, really.
Before the Smorgasbord, Noah Price was just a star in my sky... constant, familiar, bright and far above me.
But this was not the time to be picky.
I wish I’d remembered not to use it around other people, because it was kind of our word.
His face shining with the kind of radiance usually associated with religious epiphany.
I had no idea why I was saying this. It just seemed like telling the truth would mean admitting some weaknesses.