H. Alazhar said this quote

So... Dell had been a good boy with bad friends. I knew this – I used to be one of them. I’d always known Dell would disappear one day; he was too decent, too golden. This place never tainted that, and I don’t know why. He made me feel dirty. Dark and corrupt. It hadn’t always that way, and I don’t know when it changed... but I felt it now. I only knew I couldn’t hold onto him tight enough to stop those long legs carrying him away somewhere better. A day’ll come when everybody’s had you and nobody wants you anymore... As Dell drove Erin away in their rent-a-car from the Holiday Inn into the early evening traffic, I felt the walls closing in, the world swelling around me, and I knew that day had finally come. Tomorrow, I leave Paradise. It’s true. Shanise was right.I turned away as the car disappeared up the slushy street. That was the last time I saw them alive.

~ H. Alazhar

Many years later after the sell-outs, betrayals, and hatred which would tear us apart, when our brotherhood had been destroyed, I’d always look back and remember that night. That fucking wild night at the KeyClub, when the smoke stung my eyes but my world was full of nothing but blind hope. When life was not a mockery, but a very real fire which flamed through my veins like the most incredible drug... the night when Kelly-Lee Obann, drunk, high and barely 20 the time, looked out through his hair with a terrible nakedness and said to me; “We’re not gonna make it out of this alive. You know that, right?

~ H. Alazhar

I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way – but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn’t hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...

~ H. Alazhar