coming-of-age

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.

This city is yawning before me, but I'm not tired.

We screamed this primeval scream built on a base of freedom, raised from beauty of a dying breed, and threw our heads back to laugh or cry, I'm not entirely sure which. But the scream shook the golden sunset, bringing it to its knees.

When I grow up, maybe I will bethe first one to circle the sea.Or maybe I will just spend all my daydoing everything my way.Maybe I will be in a world of my ownI just hope not alone.I just know that whatever I doI will never, ever forget about you.

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.

I push through physical pain. Life hurts. I enjoy the positives.

Quick, somebody call the caretaker!_ Gemma__ stage voice rang out loud and clear. __here__ some trash here that needs to be taken out._ She earned a chorus of laughs as she walked towards us, then came to a standstill right beside me. __hrist, it reeks, too,_ she said, pinching her nose. __hat did you do, Malice? Douse yourself in the whole bottle? Oh, never mind. I don__ expect you to have heard of the adage __ess is more_.

In no mood for one of her silly games, I snatched it off her and scanned the page. It turned out to be a list of names, all of them boys, and some of whom I recognised. And then I noticed the title: __peration: Popping the Cherry_. I leaped to my feet and fired a glare at each of them in turn, trying not to shout. __re you shitting me?

I was not a believer in instalove. So said the rational part of my brain.

Well that__ open to debate,_ he said. 'It sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, and I hate the thought of you throwing yourself at guys just to try and get laid. Christ, I__ do you myself if I thought it would keep you safe.___ow that__ true friendship,_ I said, cracking under the severity of his tone.

What can I do?_ his gaze on me was intense, like I was some sort of love guru or something. I almost laughed out loud at how unqualified I was for that position.

Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.

Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy__ust a boy.

In the Empire, the Scholars are not allowed to read and, like so many bullies and power-seekers who hide behind ideologies to justify the terrible things they do, their oppressors wear masks. 'An Ember in the Ashes' suggests that such masks (literal or figurative) don__ work. Not forever, anyway. Masks only cover faces. It__ actions that show who we are.

Life is not only consisted of "yes" and "no", but a lot of "yes and's" and "no but's".

I am made of a thousand ghosts. Only you can shoot me down.

Perhaps death is just a big lie.