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The roaring street is hung for miles With fierce electric fire.
I am a grown woman and I can say whatever I want. It’s one of the few perks of adulthood.”
“Far kinder tsereist men a velt,” Tess said, one of Grandpa Ben’s favorite sayings. For your children you would tear the world apart. “And I would,” he’d said, laying his still-strong hand on the top of Tess’s head. “One day, you’ll understand what that means.”
Nine hunched like a sad gargoyle beside her.
The blocks dropped from Theo’s hands and landed right on the Tower Green where the wives of Henry VIII had lost their heads. And Theo—who, as it turned out, was neither calm nor well adjusted—lost his.
Paper soaked up the ink, drank it in as if it were thirsty for it.
“That’s not a crown,” she’d told him. “That’s a nimbus of outrage.”
It begins, as everything does, with a lady.’”
“Not a lot for New York City,” grumbled a middle-aged man with a fake orange tan and the kind of smooth, unwrinkled face Tess’s dad liked to call “well preserved” and her mom liked to call “pickled.”
His wife socked him. Or maybe it was just a random woman who found him irritating.
“Remember,” Grandpa said, “history is filled with horrors as well as wonders. And so are people.”
Tessa’s rubbing of the etching from the bottom of the Tredwells’ servants’ heating stove
“You could take human bites,” said her mother. “Or ladylike ones,” said Theo. Tess chewed loudly. “I’m a lady and these are my lady bites.”
Nine stretched across both their laps, purring loud enough to power the universe.
THIS OBJECT HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY REMOVED AS WE REVISE ITS FACIAL EXPRESSION, WHICH WAS DEEMED ZOOLOGICALLY IMPROBABLE AND/OR TERRIFYING TO SMALL CHILDREN.
Isn’t there a fine line between brilliance and madness?
The train got higher and higher, level with the tops of the highest buildings in the borough, the speed of the train making the people walking below look like rain-smeared chalk scrawled on a sidewalk.
All of them had been in this apartment. The walls had heard their wishes. The floors had felt their footsteps. How could he leave this place when so many of the people he loved had left the last of themselves here?
They ran across the street, barely avoiding a man on a unicycle flying a flag that said, WHAT GOOD IS A STORY YOU ONLY WANT TO READ ONCE?
“Ghosts. Pirates. The pirates were supposed to have an entrance to the tunnel from a bar nearby, guarded by a pair of seven-foot-tall Turks with scimitars.”
