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

by Seanan McGuire

“We can’t make things that happened not have happened by wishing that they hadn’t.”

The new voice was sweet, happy, bland. If oatmeal were a person, it would sound like that girl.

“Don’t be mean,” said Emily. “Why shouldn’t she?” asked Sumi, with what sounded like genuine confusion. “I can tell by the sound of her voice that she’s good at it.”

“Not having a name sounds like it would be really difficult. How could anyone tell you when your pizza was ready?”

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.

Sometimes she felt like the world where she’d been born was the most nonsensical of them all. Sure, gravity always worked and clouds didn’t talk, but people told lies big enough to block the sun, and everyone just let them, like it was nothing to revise the story of an entire world to make yourself feel better.

“Heroism is addictive. Maybe that’s why it sounds so much like ‘heroin.’”

I was dead once. It hurt. It wasn’t anything, and it hurt anyway, because death doesn’t need to be something to hurt.