Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common?

Can I ask you something?' you said. 'How did you ever survive that scandal?'She said, 'I refused to be shamed.'How did you do that?' you asked. 'When they came at me, I kept coming,' she said.

A.J. Watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.