She hadn’t been a bratty kid—she hadn’t been given the opportunity, really—but she found herself prone to meanness as a child in a way that always struck her as slightly unnatural, a knee-jerk distaste for most of those around her and a tendency—like a stewing, necromantically afflicted child from a movie—to silently wish for misfortune to befall classmates who had wronged her, or who had things she wanted.
