curious openness common to twelve-year-olds: Hai saw no beauty or prettiness in them, but rather a forceful, brooding kinship to an amorphous boyness, that realm he was supposed to possess but was still partially hidden from him. Though it had no source he could name, there was something beyond reach, a gleaming heat, the way one knows, at times, where the moon hangs in the sky on an overcast night. Or a word existing before its definition—and like all things without meaning, it made no sense.
