Persephone (Into Shadow, #2)

by Lev Grossman

Evan was notorious for having been accused—but never convicted!—of stealing embalmed dead rats from the bio lab.

Unlike me, he always believed in me. He always told me I was special, that I had a gift, and I just had to wait till I grew up to find out what it was.

For some people bad things happening brings them together. We were the other kind of people.

It was like I’d become a ghost without having to go through the messy intermediate step of actually dying.

Now I was in tenth grade, and Lindsay was the only one of my friends who’d stuck around. I guess she believed in ghosts.

just wanted to be somebody else, I didn’t care who. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I was drowning in myself.

Honestly I could not have explained why I cared so much, but it was like someone had stuck a blunt sword right through my chest and was prying my ribs apart and crushing my heart. Even this, even this I could not have.

they completely lost it and shot some of the colonials and bayoneted a few more, who died and had elementary schools named after them.

But this was often my response to situations of extreme stressfulness: I just curled up and shut down.

“The federalists,” Alonzo whispered. “I knew it.” “They will have their revenge,” I whispered back.

There was so much you didn’t get to choose. The hard way was going to be very hard. It would be a long, long time before I felt safe and warm again.

But I would be free, and I would be myself. Show me those fucking pomegranate seeds, I thought. Come on. I’ll eat every last one of them.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.