The Listeners

by Maggie Stiefvater

This was the nature of the average Avallon guest: people so high on the social ladder they had to duck for the sun to go overhead.

“One of them’s decided she’s in love,” Griff replied. “The other’s got her mind on revenge.” Griff’s twin girls had only just turned five.

He had had the greatest laugh, the most inclusive laugh, that always sounded as if it was for you rather than about you. The moment she’d heard it, she’d known that was what she’d wanted her own laugh to sound like.

The attack had been both audacious and successful, two concepts Americans had come to believe they had ownership of.

No one ever asked after the dead. Only the living. How’s your mother, how’s your sister, how’s your cousin. Unless someone achieved fame or infamy, their story stopped when their heart did.

To have achieved notability but not be asked to perform it: that was a kind of luxury, too.

The kindness of men! This world forged them with their armor on the inside, and if trauma tugged that skeleton free from their skin, they no longer had the structural integrity to stand.