selected passages

Will, usually, went to a good deal of trouble to avoid thinking about the past, a place that, to his mind, was seductive but vastly overrated. The future was what interested him. That was where the money was. (p.2)

"Come on, Silly Rachel. Let's go downstairs." He put out his hand. And—one of the most miraculous things about small children who happened to be your own—she took it. (p.33)

"Why would anyone be named Layla, if not to be lusted over?" (p.43)

"If they ever made a movie of our high-school years, the sound track would be unsellable," he says. (p.60)

The world whipped you when you were small and poor. One morning, Gail told him, Esperanza had shown up with a black eye and bruises on her cheek. She'd thought, guiltily, that she ought to ask her about it, but the language barrier, which prevented all but the most rudimentary communication, kept her from even fumbling toward a question. Moreover, she didn't like Esperanza. (p.81)

Barry and Gary emerged from the backdrop flap together, in close conference. This pierced Will immediately, just as Barry's comment about Gary being able to beat him had: Will now realized that the level of nonintimacy he failed to enjoy with Barry would never allow the kind of heads-close-together talking that Barry and Gary were now doing—about what? What conversational vein had Will failed to tap? The terrible thing was, he felt fairly certain (fairly certain) that whatever they were discussing wasn't even particularly interesting; what was most interesting was that he was left out. The schoolyard never died. (p.117)

One night soon afterward he awoke in the deep watches of the night, three or four o'clock, to pee. Standing sleepily at the toilet in the dark, he glanced out the window at the quarter moon, setting in the bare trees: it looked incorrectly sideways somehow, and full of a meaning he couldn't decipher, like a joke in a foreign language, Moonish. And Will thought, quite matter-of-factly: My father's going to die. (p.180)

If it were the movies, Will thought, he would say hello a couple more times, just to convey he'd been hung up on; but he didn't need to say anything. The line was dead. (p.184)

She had to take the money to the court clerk, up a long staircase in a bright little room, two women busy talking to each other and laughing, making her wait till they were good and ready. Then the woman, with no smile for Chia, had to count the bills like eight times, flip flip flip flip flip, ten hundreds, straight from Joel's pocket, he'd been so sweet, barely even letting her thank him. What was in it for him? She would've done him, and he wasn't interested. Or he was interested—he'd as much as told her—but couldn't, somehow. Because he was old? The word scruple, as a verb, popped into her head. Could it be a verb? Funny, it had screw in it. She wouldn't have half-minded, he was sweet and she loved his hands. The hands had pushed the bills into hers and pushed her away. Go. Pay me when you pay me. She'd managed to kiss his cheek anyway. All bristles. He'd blushed. Sweet. (p.230)

He glanced across the room, where Gail was dancing with Mario, standing stiff and straight. What was her problem? Why couldn't she, at least, have the grace to flirt with another man, or pretend to? Lately grace seemed to have deserted her: ill-tempered and distant, she was always knocking things over and bumping into furniture. A few days before, in the kitchen, she had stepped squarely on Will's big toe and barely apologized. Maybe she had a brain tumor. He had an instant fantasy, a millisecond movie: Gail dies, he marries Layla, Patti on the side. Suddenly, unbidden, the children enter in, glum, motherless, meeting Layla. End of movie. (p.249)

That was one of the things that she liked so absolutely about him: he never sulked or whined the way Will did; he seemed to understand his power, even when things, temporarily, weren't going his way. No wonder he'd won all those sales awards. She loosened slightly in his arms. (p.251)

There's another thing she could do: she could make it all stop. She's thought of it a thousand times, thought of all the ways she could do it, wondered if it would change Rome's cocky face for a second, wondered if Gary would be sorry. Or anyone. But one thing: she doesn't want it to hurt. But it hurts so bad now that she believes she could do it, believes it would be some kind of release. But how? The woods are back there, behind the houses, the quarry, she remembers they used to dynamite there. The fireworks are still going whump, but less of them now. Probably if she just lay down in the woods by the quarry and went to sleep, probably she'd wake up dead. She laughs a little at that, the idea of waking up dead, but she believes it, she's always believed you go somewhere. Now she's smiling, imagining waking up dead in the woods, and it's summer forever, with no bugs. And you could lie in the sun forever and never get cancer, you'd get a beautiful shade of gold—gold. Gold. It's hit her, all at once, what's funny about this block. She's standing in front of the single house on it with no lights on, staring at this old familiar run-down brick house with the overgrown yard and suddenly remembering the one strangely good thing: Joel. (p.259)

Some people never got better. He had, in his own way, but he knew about people who didn't, he knew what it could be like not to; sometimes he wasn't better, himself. (p.276)

How could he make love to anyone as beautiful as Cindy Island? It was always a problem. He was once beautiful himself, in a way, but he never quite believed in it, for one thing, and anyway, masculine beauty, for the hetero-practicing male, was a strange, clotted, confusing, and untrustworthy quantity, mostly unusable for the possessor, except as a kind of party trick. Extreme feminine beauty—radiant, no-makeup, traffic-stopping beauty—was also untrustworthy, and intimidating, to boot. Cindy's secret was that she was intimidated by her own beauty, she wore it uneasily, she saw what it did to people and it worried her endlessly. (p.285)

She takes him to her soft bed, where they lie down next to each other and fall asleep like children. (p.302)

What happened next made no sense. (p.330)