Until the February of his eleventh year, Joseph Cohen felt an inordinate kind of sympathy for all earthly things he encountered, even—and in some moods, especially—for inanimate objects.
Did something happen again? she asks. She sounds concerned and I don’t want to make her concerned. Also I really don’t know how to answer her question.
“He looked nice, shy. She didn’t say hello, or smile, because despite her costume—a lace trimmed slip and her grandmother’s pearl choker—she didn’t care much that day.”
“They probably thought Evan just smelled like that: nauseatingly floral like Katie Levi-Moretti, the first girl in his high school class to discover perfume and, therefore, the last person everybody wanted to sit next to at assembly.”
“Duty spun at the center of Dan’s being. In ancient times, he would have carried Juno across the river, and parted the seas if it meant that one girl with chemically shedding blonde hair would get to live out a childish marriage fantasy.”
