In the deep end of the rec lane the old white woman is treading water and talking with the obese black man who should be eight feet tall. A judge has ruled that, according to the length of the man’s leg bones, 

When one of Pete’s fraternity brothers posted the video to a closed Greek Facebook group, people said that what happened in the video was rape. At first, Pete thought the commenters meant that he had raped the girl. 

Pam and Curtis brought Stacy to Jamaica because they didn’t know what else to do with her. They believed that her old-time granny would straighten her out. In Brooklyn, Stacy cut her classes often, and she was caught giving a boy a blowjob in an empty classroom.

“I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “Last New Year’s Eve, of all times. I bloody hate New Year’s. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”

Each November for the past sixteen years, a group of twenty-two men has convened at a hotel off Interstate 95 to reenact a gruesome milestone in football history: the 1985 play (known in the Washington Redskins playbook as the Throwback Special)

We are all sitting around the fire pit, talking about how not to get raped. We have advice, opinions, instructions because we are the adults and Gertrude is the kid, and we’ve been to college, so we think we know

The Baroness was a charming creature. The Baron had taken her from a family of high principles and had no reason to mistrust her, despite the fact that the tooth of time had already gnawed into him quite deeply

The Germans were arguing about ­directions. Lennart understood some German—he’d studied it at school—but he was having a hard time following what they were saying.

This is the beginning. Here is where the story begins. The character is introduced—we meet the character, her, we’ll call her a her.

This morning, Esther Saint-Juste did nothing between the time she woke up and the time she got out of bed. There is nothing she’ll be able to tell her husband when he calls just before lunch.