coming-of-age

Your mother would have more luck winning her election than teaching you how to be charming. Izzy Malone, going to charm school! Are you going to walk across the room with a book stuck on your head?""No, it's not like that at all," I said as he doubled over with laughter. "And I really don't see what's so funny.""It's just that"--he gasped--"it would be like teaching a hippo to wear high heels!

I__ looking to make a miracle

The bracelet and the first charm appeared the day I punched Austin Jackson in the nose. I didn't mean to slug him. His face just got in my way. It was a bruising end to a disastrous first month in middle school.

As for learning to wear high heels, no need to worry. I've got no tolerance for those dreadful things. If God wanted us girls tottering around like a bunch of drunken sailors, we'd have been born wearing stilts!

Turns out, most girls would rather put on lip gloss than play with sand toads.

P.S. Please don't call me Isabella. That name belongs to a really pretty girl who never wrecks her clothes and who never gets dirt under her fingernails. That's definitely not me. My name is Izzy.

Words are a weapon, and rotten kids like Tyler Jones get a free pass when it comes to using them because the marks they leave are invisible. Why don't more adults realize that?

It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn__ use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila__ wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn__ I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn__ I stopped to say to Nino, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article__ coming out, let__ talk, let__ dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale__ driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also__es, also__f Antonio?

What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.

She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.

Both the two of us knew it. We watched the lie go up big and slow between us, then it burst like a spit bubble. They always burst before too long.

College isn't half as much fun as they told us it was going to be.""It's not one-hundredth as much fun.

Can__ count on no miracles. Sometimes, you just got to have a plan.

A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn't realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery's favorite vehicle.

He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand__o longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground.

The kinds of jobs a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old can get are not worth doing. They pay shit and suck.

I wonder if he__ been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.