“There was something just slightly off in Vince’s bright, Asian smile. Like he had learned to smile from a picture book. Even when he made the required dirty put-down jokes with the cops, nobody got mad at him. Nobody laughed, either, but that didn’t stop him. He kept making all the correct ritual gestures, but he always seemed to be faking. That’s why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.”
“I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities. I had studied hard and practiced long, and when I applied myself no one could tell I was faking it.”
“Anybody can be charming if they don’t mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don’t have a conscience. I say them.”
“I had been too good too many times. It could become a problem. But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn’t sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.”
“Rahel looked around her and saw she was in a Play. But she had only a small part. She was just the landscape. A flower perhaps. Or a tree. A face in the crowd. A Townspeople.”
“I feel like everyone fakes who they really are, when deep down we’re all equal amounts of screwed up. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you? So all this row was because you thought you’d get to stay home from school and go a-fishing? Tom, Tom, I love you so, and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness.”