Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children, #7)

by Seanan McGuire

But taking something back doesn’t mean it never happened, only that someone was willing to fight hard enough to change it. Some graves lie empty; some children run home. Some children hide under their covers and cry, not for the beauty of a sky filled with rainbows or a field of singing roses, but from the weight of all they’ve seen and done and lost and paid.

A jack-o’-lantern might be beautiful, but it was still something that had been cut open and hollowed out because someone wanted it to suit their idea of what a pumpkin ought to be. It wasn’t its own self anymore.

I only just got here, but I can already tell this place is … it’s small. It’s hard and it’s small and it’s mean. It knows what’s true for you isn’t always true for me, and it doesn’t care, because it wants to make us all have the same kind of truth and believe in it the same kind of way. It’s a bad place. It thinks it’s helping and it isn’t.

It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways.

The punishment for this was going to be enormous. Sumi rejoiced, because when they got punished, they were going to be punished for doing something, not just for being who they were and not who the adults around them wanted them to be. Doing was always better than just being. Doing was a choice.

I understand what cows are saying, but I don’t know how to talk back to them, and I try not to listen too hard. Cows write really bad poetry about grass and clouds and the farmers they see by the fences, and it makes me sad.”