My parents treated me like a breakable heirloom, afraid to fight or fret in front of me least I shatter.
I thought I’d never understand boys,” said Bronwyn, shaking her head. “But now I think I’ve got it. They’re all idiots!
There are lots of things I don’t know about you, but I want to.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like we know each other so well in some ways, but in others it’s like we just met.
They were of the past, and the past always mend itself, no matter how me interfere.
They worried that fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical realities.
He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchman at the end of the world.
School cafeterias had long ranked among my least favorite places on the planet. They were loud, ugly, they stank, and they were filled – as this one was – with cliques of anxious teenagers swirling around in a complex social dance I could never quite figure out the steps to.
I’d never asked what year it was here-1492? 1750?-though to the animals I guess it hardly mattered. This was a safe place apart from the world of people, and only in the world of people did the year make any difference.
I knew it sounded crazy, but crazier things have turned out to be true.
Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said. “Only when they get excited,” said Addison. “Most of their eggs are quite safe – and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.
But even grown-ups have elders who know better.
All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places humming with machines, not in heaps on the sodden reeking ground with ants marching over them, a brass letter opener clutched in one trembling hand.
I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we’d seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind. But you can’t feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse anymore than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human.
He made a grab for me, but slow and drunk is no match for fast and scared shitless.
I’d never met anyone with Emma’s brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight the sudden urge to kiss her, right here in front of everyone.
I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days – this perpetual deathless summer – had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.
What a spoiled, ungrateful ass I was.
But I swore to myself that we’d find our friends and our ymbryne, no matter the cost, even if there were only bodies to recover – even if it meant adding our own to the pile.
She’d been waging a battle against tears, but now, in a sudden break, she lost it.
It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died.