Everybody's crooked. The trick is to find out how they're bent.

Very few people mate for life with the people they fall for at twelve. Doesn't mean is isn't real, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, doesn't mean it doesn't matter, but basically, we're talking a practice swing in the big game of love.

Dempseys are never in trouble. We just have stretches of life that are more interesting than others.

I could shove this swizzle stick through his heart, Min thought. She wouldn’t do it, of course. The stick was plastic and not nearly pointed enough on the end. Also people didn’t do things like that in Southern Ohio. A sawed-off shotgun, that was the ticket.

He looked like every glossy frat boy in every nerd movie ever made, like every popular town boy who’d ever looked right through her in high school, like every rotten rich kid who’d ever belonged where she hadn’t.

My mama warned me about guys like you.

He turned to her as if he’d heard her and took off his sunglasses, and she went down the steps to meet him, wiping her sweaty palms on her dust-smeared khaki shorts. “Hi, I’m Sophie Dempsey,” she said, flashing the Dempsey gotta-love-me grin as she held out her hot, grimy hand, and after a moment he took it.

His hand was clean and cool and dry, and her heart pounded harder as she looked into his remote, gray eyes.

“Hello, Sophie Dempsey,” her worst nightmare said. “Welcome to Temptation.

You know,” she stammered, resenting the way her body reacted to his touch with fireworks and songbirds, “I kind of hate you sometimes.”

“If that’s code for ‘I want to fuck you until I can’t walk straight’, then I kind of hate you, too.