Hello, Universe

by Erin Entrada Kelly

the Salinas family was—big personalities that bubbled over like pots of soup. Virgil felt like unbuttered toast standing next to them.

😂 that comparison is 👌🏼

That was their name for him: Turtle. Because he wouldn’t “come out of his shell.” Every time they said it, a piece of him broke.

Awww... the whole chapter is painting him as a not very happy boy...

I’m not sure what God looks like. I don’t know if there’s one big God in heaven or if there’s two or three or thirty, or maybe one for each person. I’m not sure if God is a boy or a girl or an old man with a white beard. But it doesn’t matter. I just feel safe knowing someone’s listening.

And that’s faith in a nutshell

imagine my prayers traveling up, up, up and hovering over my bed until they lift all the way through the roof. Then I imagine them landing on a cloud and sitting there, waiting to be answered. When I was younger, I thought the cloud would get so heavy that all my prayers would come falling down and I’d have everything I wished for, but now I’m eleven so I know better. I still picture them sailing up, though. There’s no harm in that.

And this is why kids books are so special and feel good like - they remind you of how once you too had creative thoughts like these ☺️

He liked to say that Twizzlers were one of his favorite food groups. I’d shake my head and say, “Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate.” It was our routine. But we don’t do things like that anymore. I don’t think he knows how to be a dad to an eleven-year-old girl. You can’t sit an eleven-year-old girl on your shoulders, especially not when she’s all knees and elbows and five foot five, and you can’t make hot chocolate and wait up for Santa Claus or read picture books.

Awww 😔 it breaks your heart if you’ve ever been a daddy’s girl

There are times when my mom is easy to talk to. If you catch her on a good day, she isn’t too mom-like. But I can never tell which mom I’ll get. Sometimes she is overprotective, overbearing, overeverything.

A good mom definition that would fit most moms 😅

So Virgil(is) is a guinea pig and Valencia is a bird. The first one’s easy to figure out why - it’s his pet. I wonder what hers has to do with though

Virgil’s father answered instead. “Because boys need to play sports, not fool around on a silly piano. Right, Turtle?”

Virgil’s father’s a bit of an idiot, right?

Kaori was mildly surprised to get a text from one of her clients (her only client, truth be told) on the first day of summer, particularly at seven forty-five in the morning. But the night before, just as she was gliding to sleep, she’d had the vision of a hawk perched on a giant fence post. Only now she realized it must have been a vulture, not a hawk. And vulture started with V, just like Virgil’s name. The connection couldn’t have been clearer.

Riiiight... kids..!

“Meet me in the spirit chamber,” Kaori said. She waved toward Gen’s pajamas. “But get rid of the bunnies first.”

😂 she’s cracking me up Seriously, who can be so much of a Madame at twelve yo?!!

Darkness was a sightless beast, as far as Virgil was concerned.

It’s funny how one always fears what one can’t see, literally and metaphorically

His face is scrunched up, like he’s sniffing something offensive. He’s got beady eyes and round cheeks and they’re all shoved up together. Meanness always shows on people’s faces.

True enough, which is why animated characters are so much fun to look at.

There was something weird about being deaf. It wasn’t natural. That girl had a lotta nerve. Chet kind of suspected she wasn’t really deaf, anyway.

And here’s how hate starts: ignorance. And fear. Ignorance and fear is a bomb combination for the hate detonator.

Respect came in two flavors, Mr. Bullens said: fear or admiration. Sometimes both. Otherwise you’re just a weakling at the bottom of the food chain, ready to get crushed under someone else’s boot.

And that’s the mentality that’ll have you raising a bully of a son.

Sometimes the grocery store gives jobs to those kind of people. Like a favor, you know? Disabled people don’t have it all going on upstairs”—Mr. Bullens tapped his forehead—“but they can figure out how to bag groceries.”

Barf.... what is wrong with this man. He’s the kind of person who makes me question the ability of every human being to Procreate...

Sometimes the only way to teach people was to embarrass them, wake them up, make them see the error of their ways. That’s what Mr. Bullens always said.

Sigh 😔

“By the time we get out of here, my son’ll be graduating from high school,” said Mr. Bullens. He laughed to show he was only joking.

This is such a sad parent-child dynamics. As a teacher, I just died a little inside after reading this chapter, especially because there are such kids in my classes 😔

“Why do you always bring up the bad things?” “If you didn’t have bad things, you wouldn’t have good things. They would all just be things. Did you ever think about that?”

That’s right 😌

One thing I know for sure is I could never be a dog. They eat anything. Not me. I’m a picky eater.

Same, girl, same.

I like to pretend I’m Jane Goodall, except with squirrels instead of chimpanzees.

This is so adorable and also part of what being a kid is. You mimic grownups as a kid, fueled by whatever you saw in a book or a movie/documentary that moved you and made you passionate about something. You always find a way to do it, you don’t just give up and say ‘oh, I could never be that, there’s no chimpanzees on my woods’. You just make it work with what little you have laying around and fill in the blanks with your imagination, creativeness and ingenuity. And it’s this lovely thing I try to remind myself of everyday when I teach - give them the fuel and the confidence to fill in the blanks and they’ll do wonders.

Life is a lot easier when you’re prepared for stuff. I wish I had been prepared when Roberta and I stopped being friends.

Ouch... right in the feels kind of situation. It’s always a stab in the heart whenever you lose your first friendships.

You know how sometimes you’re friends with someone and they start hanging out with other people and eventually you’re not friends anymore, but you can’t remember when it all happened?

Too well...

That night, I cried on my mom’s lap. That’s how upset I was. And my mom said that if they were real friends, they would have figured out a game that all of us could play. I can’t stand when she says stuff like that. It makes me think she doesn’t get it. Bad friends were better than no friends. And besides, I thought they were my real friends in the first place. That was the whole reason I was crying.

It’s so hard to know what to say on these situations as a grown person talking to a child. On the one hand you want to use the crappy context to show and teach the lesson of what a real friend is supposed to act like, on the other hand you forget to focus on the pain of the newly found truth that your friends aren’t as good as you thought they were. 😔

He just didn’t know why his parents were so preoccupied with him “coming out of his shell.” What was so bad about a shell, anyway? Turtles had survived on earth more than two hundred million years—longer than snakes or crocodiles, even. And turtles lived a long time, too. American box turtles lived to be over a hundred, and they had excellent eyesight and senses of smell. Turtles truly were extraordinary animals. What if people had forced turtles to come out of their shells two hundred million years ago? They probably wouldn’t exist anymore.

This is such good reasoning that if a kid ever tells me this I won’t be able to counter argue ☺️

She preferred the comforts of home, where she always knew what to expect.

Hence why she loves the whole spirits thing

“Of all the questions you ever ask yourself in life, never ask, ‘What’s the point?’ It’s the worst question in the world,” Ruby said.

True that

Even if just “Hello.” One word. That’s all it took to strike up a friendship, right? One word could make all the difference.

Indeed, that’s true. And what’s the worst that could happen, right? I should be taking notes hahah

“The world looks different through newly opened eyes, Virgilio. It’s the trick of time. What you believe today, you may not believe tomorrow. Things change when you’re not looking. And then you open your eyes, and you see—” Light.

Lovely paragraph. Must remember to use in moments of distress with my little ones.