That was probably another thing Aracely had almost asked ten times, opening her mouth and then hesitating. Why, to Miel, a pumpkin couldn't just be a pumpkin. A question Aracely knew better than to say out loud.

I may know how to nudge a man toward proposing, or how to hearten a tired mother. I may know who needs the sugar of violet pan dulce. But I don't know how to fold my heart into dough or lace vanilla sugar with my secrets.I don't know how to sprinkle a little of what is in me, like the color of the nonpareils.

To the boys who get called girls,the girls who get called boys,and those who live outside these words.To those called names,and those searching for names of their own.To those who live on the edges,and in the spaces in between.I wish for you every light in the sky.

Nothing else in the world makes a man like that more afraid than five girls on their periods.

I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael's tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family's tamales.

Then comes another hand. And another one. They come out of the dark like the night is growing them.

Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust. He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.

That I was a boy, but it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would've liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn't let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl...

Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.' ...'Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.

Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.