She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

If he does he's a fool," said Hazael. "The message is clear. Please enjoy this lovely fruit while contemplating all the ways we might kill you in your sleep.

There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.

Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.

And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

I'm going to be the scariest grandma in the world.

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.