If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

Sure, I liked girls but I was always too terrified to speak to them unless we were arguing or I was calling them stupidos, which was one of my favorite words that year.

Don't bring up the Beyonder any more than necessary.