Cedar on her brother Barnaby:
I never would've thought that I'd miss Barnaby, because we used to have some big fights. Once, he punched me in my mouth because I kicked his sand castle, and I got a chipped front tooth. But that was when we were just kids, and now that he's seventeen he never punches me. And he doesn't kick me out of his room, either. He lets me sit on his bed and ask questions. Mostly, what I missed was just him being there, even if we aren't in the same room talking. I missed all the stuff that comes along with him: his weird singing, the trouble he gets into, the things he knows. I like that. I liked it when the family felt bigger, with Grandma and Barnaby. Now there's only two, it feels too small to be a real family. It feels like a thing with holes in it.

Cedar's crush:
"Was Kite pleased that you wanted to keep training?" Caramella asked.

"I dunno. He didn't say."

"Well, couldn't you tell?"

"No. Maybe."

"Did you get that funny feeling?" (The funny feeling is when you like someone and your tummy goes all empty and pounding and words bury down blunt inside and suddenly erupt out your mouth all wrong, like a spew, so you go red in the face, because it matters a great deal that you make a good impression.)

"At first I did, but after a while I felt normal."

"So, you've got a crush on him, haven't you?"

"He put his hand on my shoulder," I said, faintly sidestepping the question, because I wanted to draw it out, make it last, like eating an ice cream slowly.

"You have got a crush. I can tell." She folded her arms triumphantly, as if she'd just won a game of Fish.

Cedar on life:
Sometimes life hits you at such a startling lightning kind of angle, that you get pushed off your normal viewing spot. You stop knowing how things are. Instead of what you know, there are the patterns that stars make; the sound of the night breathing; the small aching spot where your feet touch the earth . . . And you've never felt closer to it. You think that if there is an It, you and It are nearly touching. You feel religious and devoted and tiny. Just for a moment you feel as if the whispering coming from the leaves and beetles and sky and footsteps and sighs is going directly toward your ear. So you listen.

There, sitting on a suitcase, next to a stinky dog, in a suburban street in Brunswick, I had one of those moments. What I heard was Life telling me to go back and, as they say in the movies, face the music. Go home, it said. Go home.

Cedar on the difference between boys and girls:
The thing about boys is that they don't talk in the same way as girls. They talk about things. Out-and-about things, things you can touch and see, not the kinds of things that are inside. Those inside things aren't really things at all, since you can't see them — not with your eyes — and you can't hold them — not with your hands. So they're situations. I call them situations of the heart. Boys don't talk about heart situations. If they're blokish, they talk about bulky things that move, like cars, footballs, and chicks. If they're natty-sharp, they go on about plug-and-socket things, like computers, stereos, and science experiments. I think really smart boys probably talk about the government and the theater, but there aren't many that smart.

It's not that girls' talk is better or more important, not in subject matter anyway, because honestly some of them only talk about boys and how to make boys like them. That's the older ones, and it's so boring. I wouldn't do that because I'm a feminist and I plan to get my own opinions about the state of the world and I wouldn't ever let a boy tell me how to get them or what to do with them, either. It's the way girls talk that's different. With girls you can go on and on about tiny little things that happen to you. You linger on the details, you chomp right through to the facts and get to the bone, the nitty-gritty gristly chewy sense of things, the gooey core, the center of that messy weave of feelings that bury into your skin and wrap you up. Not that you can ever hit that center, but if you hover around it for a while you can get some kind of blurry view of it.