We are fourteen, some of us fifteen, and we spend our lunchtimes comparing notes on bleedings and kissings and other similar crimes. We eat canteen meatloaf with our mouths whaling open, laugh screeching laughs that end in coughing fits and spat-out hunks of bread. p.5-6

We were sitting on the front steps of my building, drinking hot chocolate from polystyrene cups. It was 4 a.m. on a Tuesday; thin light, city moving like an agitated creature. We were all still growing used to the nighttime, the blue-veined hours of morning that lay only lightly, the white spiders and noctule bats. Without sleeping, it was harder to parcel up your days, to maintain a sense of urgency. The extra hours granted a kind of fearless laziness, a permission to dawdle through the day with the confidence that there would be more time, later, whenever you liked.
'I don't think mine likes me very much,' I said to my brother, finishing my hot chocolate and reaching for the dregs of his. 'It always seems so distracted.'
My brother shrugged, squinting down toward the bottom of the steps where our Sleeps were jostling elbows and kicking at each other's feet. p.26

The nights around that time were balmy through slices of open window, clouded with the smell of charcoal barbeques before the meat goes on to cook. We would argue in desultory fashion over which movie to watch, knowing as always that we would end up watching Jenny's choices, if only for a quiet life. p.49

The nights seemed larger by the age of sixteen, a curious sense that the strangulated skies of my childhood had suddenly been granted room to rage about. At full moon, Helen would go out into the garden and howl, the way that wolves are wont to do in movies, and she encouraged me to join her, dragging on my trouser legs until I accompanied her onto the lawn. Full-mooned nights brought with them a very particular ozone smell, a nitrous, liquid atmosphere that turned my hair to greasy curlicues. When she had howled her fill, Helen would prowl the garden in a strange, custodial circle, snapping at fireflies. Did you girls have fun, my stepmother would ask us afterward, sitting up at odd hours in the kitchen with her cup of orange tea. p.77-78

From somewhere inside, she hears the slight reverb of soundcheck, a swell of warmth within her like a welcome forcing open of her chest; the band's very particular wailing lushness, their wide and craving snarl. p.89

She would agree with them, of course--frank feminist, happy with her job and her hobbies, easy in her single skin. Privately, however, she knew herself better. Knew herself for what she was: a great failure at solitude. Sluicing through her twenties illuminated only by the glow of terrestrial television, finding much to her dismay at the age of twenty-nine that she longed to amuse and to be longed for. A faint life. Eating apricots and growing bony and forgetting how to talk to people. Loneliness like a taste on her skin. p.109

She will lay herself down, await the convocation. Jellyfish beaching against her arms and legs, the crest of body on delicate body. They will cover her, glove her hands, circle her ankles... Nicola will stay with them well into the morning, their pulsing bells like so many painful hearts. Blanketed, almost head to toe, she will feel the tide recede. Her fingers will come to feel a touch gelatinous at their points, softened along their webbing. She will imagine herself sinking down, becoming something less than solid, spilling insides onto the sand. p.147

She told me she would pop to the corner shop when it got a little lighter and buy me a bag of blood oranges but I told her she might scare the other customers. Well I wouldn't want to embarrass you, she said coolly in response to this...
She shook her head. You never want to talk about you. I know you think it's being polite but actually it just makes me feel like you don't trust me. I sighed, trying to balance the logic of her language against the insanity of her appearance in my kitchen. She shook her head again and a segment of earthworm dropped out of her ear. p.157

They throw a rope out to the tip of the lighthouse--a painted iron finial like a candle on a cake--and tie themselves as fast as they can. They sleep like that, circling on a short cord around the drowned tower, ignoring the groan of creatures below. Things down there, growing. p.180