To us he’s like... like scenery, in the background of our lives, but for him, he’s the main character. He has a life and a job and a whole story. He’s a real person. And to him, we’re the background scenery.
Nobody watched people that much, and for that long, except me, and I had serious emotional problems.
Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the freedom and courage to make your own choices, no matter how simple or scary or hard or eternal they may be.
People feared what was different, and whoever was the most different would win the witch-hunt lottery.
Someday I’d have to tell her about Ed Gein, whose mother dressed him as a girl for most of his childhood. He spent most of his adulthood killing women and making clothes out of their skin.
Most fires crackle and pop, but that’s not really the fire talking, it’s the wood. To hear the fire itself you need a huge blaze like this one, a furnace so powerful it roars with its own wind. I crouched as close as I dared and listened to its voice, a whispered howl of joy and rage.
You’ll never see us coming.
Sometimes you have to put the present through hell to get the future you want.
Nobody told nature what to do.
The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.
I want to talk to you,” she said, “for hours and days and forever, but we can’t right now. Not here, and not while we’re still in danger.
You are always in control of your own destiny.
Ted Bundy,” I said. “He killed thirty or so people around the country in the seventies – he’s the one they invented the term ‘serial killer’ for.
We think we’re invincible, and then one little crack, and boom, out comes more blood and guts and screams than you’d ever thought could be inside a single body. And when that blood goes, everything else goes with it – breath, thought, movement. Existence. One minute you’re alive and then suddenly you’re not.
They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass shed while the acid rain poured down to dissolve his flesh and bleach his bones.
Each life has a different purpose, and some people can find their purpose more easily than others. The key, the most important thing you can ever know, is that whatever your purpose is, that’s not your only choice.
Fire is a brief, temporary thing – the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel – those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance.
You’re not even happy. You’re throwing away your own life because you love someone who’s not here anymore, and you hate it, and it’s killing you. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to you, but you still love her.
What did I do that I didn’t have to do? That was always the question. Figure out what we choose when we’re free to choose anytime and you’ll know who we really are.
We’re not talking about pitching in, we’re talking about institutionalized rape. We’re talking about the government taking full control over your body – what it’s for, what you do with it, and what other people can do to it. I’m not letting some horny old dude screw me just because the law says I have to. – Xochi.