September knew a number of curse words, most of which she heard the girls at school saying in the bathrooms, in hushed voices, as if the words could make things happen just by being spoken, as if they were fairy words, and had to be handled just so.

A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet.

She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.

I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.

I don’t want to be a Princess,” she said finally. “You can’t make me be one.” She knew very well what became of Princesses, as Princesses often get books written about them. Either terrible things happened to them, such as kidnappings and curses and pricking fingers and getting poisoned and locked up in towers, or else they just waited around till the Prince finished with the story and got around to marrying her. Either way, September wanted nothing to do with Princessing.

To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.