“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”
“At lunchtime in the school yard, to his friends he was still plain and ordinary, ‘Max’... Well, not quite ordinary. But then as Aaron said, ‘Everyone’s different in some way, aren’t they?’ ”