coming-of-age

Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn__ let go until I had to come up for air.

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.

He__ used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.

I noticed him right away. No, it wasn__ his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn__ the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn__ saunter. He didn__ amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together_ whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

I caught his hand. __hat do you want me to do?__eaning down, he kissed the pulse beating on my neck just above the damaged skin. __omorrow, I need you to die.

Vane__ lips tightened to suppress a smile. __hy so hostile, love?___ou whacked me on the head with a ball!___ou deserved it.

Do you think we can be friends?_ I asked.He stared up at the ceiling. __robably not, but we can pretend.

Sometimes being vulnerable as a child is not knowing what lies ahead. We think our choices will make a huge difference in our lives because our parents and other elders spend so much time making sure we think before we act and make our minds up about what we want to be __hen we grow up_. Some are already at that stage early on, some are not. We learn the ways of the world all in good time, but being vulnerable is to be human. We never stop.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

The struggles we endure today will be the __ood old days_ we laugh about tomorrow.

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

I tell you, mister, if there__ anything good about being a hot-tempered bitch, it__ knowing right well what buttons to push in others seeing as they__e the same ones what get your own back up.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.

No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks." .... "That's what I thought too," he said at last, "when I was your age. If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time . . . it's because he wants to stay inside.

I don__ want us to be ashamed anymore (we all were crying by this point) of being pregnant or gay or poor or having a crackhead dad! I want us to be fucking proud of ourselves. (...) So we have to be proud and always remember who we are and when we make it to college, who we were.

Gloomy roomimmersed in a scentof modern cowardsfilled withshapeless creaturessitting in silencebecause they havenothing to sayFake plastic faceswith a grimaceof disappointmentpainted on themAre we stuck on holdexpecting our turnin a waiting roomof so-calledlost generation?