Cynthia Kadohata

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing

The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.

Lynn said, "The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time. What did I just say?""The sky is special.""The ocean is like that too, and people's eyes."She turned her head toward me and waited. I said, "The ocean and people's eyes are special too."That's how I learned about eyes, sky, and ocean: the three special, deep, colored, see-through things. I turned to Lynnie. Her eyes were deep and black, like mine.

I cried and cried. But then I had to stop. One thing about me was that when I was having a serious wish session, I tried never to wish impossible wishes. I might have wished for sixteen crayons instead of eight, but even when I was little, I never wished for a thousand crayons, because I knew a thousand different crayons did not exist. So on that forty-ninth day I did not wish Lynn could be alive again, because I knew she was gone.

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.