Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)

by John Scalzi

There’s nothing like sharing menarche with a billion hermaphrodites. I think it was everyone’s first time.

Her response was to haul out the entire thousand-page treaty—I didn’t even know we had a physical copy—and invite me to find the part of the treaty that said I always got to have my way. I stomped over to Hickory and Dickory and demanded they tell Mom to let me do what I wanted; Hickory told me they would have to file a request to their government for guidance, and it would take several days, by which time I would already have to be in bed. It was my first exposure to the tyranny of bureaucracy.

Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things.

It was titled “A Poem to the Girl I Just Met, Specifically a Haiku, the Title of Which Is Now Substantially Longer Than the Poem Itself, Oh, the Irony,” and it read: Her name is Zoë Smile like a summer breeze Please don’t have me cubed.

“You walked off the court,” I said. “It can’t have hurt that much.” “There’s pain you can’t see,” Enzo said. “Existential pain.” “Oh, boy,” I said. “If you’re having existential pain from dodgeball, you’re really just doing it wrong.”

“Always a good idea to confront change with your eyes open.”

You can be happy anywhere, if you have the right point of view.

So many people go through life without love. Wanting love. Hoping for love. Hungering for more of it than they have. Missing love when it was gone.