This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” as if he’d said he had only three months to live or had been raised above an artisan deli by vegans.

There was no way to fall in love with a woman just for her body in Wisconsin in January.

Rosie’s point was more this: the normal state of children is nothing remotely resembling normal. Which makes it hard to identify the aberrations when they come.

As she and Penn kept telling Poppy, you don’t have to like everyone. Find who’s fun and smart and safe, and stick with them.

Soft serve was as effective a numbing agent as Rosie knew.

so Grumwald felt his way was, if not firmly paved, at least densely pebbled, and that was as good a start as one could wish for.

For the former, she had three different colors of highlighters and the opposite kind of hope—the impossibly high kind, the this-will-solve-everything kind, the kind where you fix the problem you can instead of the problem you can’t.

“Why are you soaked?” Frank said. The girl smiled sagely as if this were one of the universe’s unknowable mysteries.

“Teleportation?” Rosie put nothing past Mr. Tongo. “Telephone.” He winked. “It’s only nineteenth-century technology, but it’s more effective because it’s not pretend.”

Claude did take a call from Carmelo, whose grandmotherly advice was, “Fuck the bastards,” and though those were in fact the most comforting words he received all week, they weren’t enough to convince him to leave his room.

He was crying again, which didn’t seem possible. At some point, shouldn’t your face run out of water?

She’s almost off to middle school, almost a teenager, about to start becoming a grown-up, so it’s time for her to explore and decide and be strong, to talk about who she is, to stand up for herself, and to deal with what sets her apart.” “How does she do that?” “Same way everyone else does,” he crowed. “Suffering!

“Oooh,” the kids all said, an apparently universal sound meaning “Do, please, continue.”

“All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know?

They were teenage boys and therefore morons. She knew this in her heart.