#untitled.

"You're boring, Vin. Bland. You ever eat bran pellets? They taste like cardboard. My physician says I gotta eat them, for my fiber intake, y'know. When I eat them, I lose my will to live. I don't even wanna eat, I just wanna die. That's how you make me feel."

"I'm not the distraction—I'm the main attraction."

From the age of six I lived at an orphanage in Prosper with a dozen or so other little girls. We were all quite odd, as little girls are, brewing potions of mud and crushed leaves out in the yard. We'd fill an empty flower pot--Missus Gardner allowed us to have one--with our ingredients which included, as often as we could find them, dead insects. We made a rule by which no girl was allowed to kill anything on account of disrupting the way of things, though we all secretly knew Poppy was killing them, and we allowed her to get away with it for the sake of our brews. We'd throw everything into the pot and stir the concoction with what sticks we could find, which were often pathetic, for we were not permitted beyond the fence. The sticks usually wound up as part of the brew and us girls would pretend they were bones.

"Those are our parents' bones!" I remember one girl exclaiming. "They're dead because they didn't want us!"