“I heard someone's playing hooky,' Zach told me. He smiled. Standing there, it felt almost like nothing bad had ever happened- or would ever happen again'There's a boy in my life,' I told him. 'He's a very bad influence.'Then Zach nodded. 'Bad boys have a way of doing that. But they're worth it.”

“I have this weird, bad feeling," said another boy. "In my feeling parts. Like something bad is going to happen.”

“I really shouldn’t leave,” Zach said, terrified what would happen the second he found himself alone with Nora.“Come on, Zach. This party sucks and not in the good way. I’ve had pap smears more fun than this.”Zach covered a laugh with a cough.“I must admit you do have a way with words.”

“Seeing him this close to me brings back every single feeling I've ever felt for this boy... the good and the bad.”

“He was nothing to me and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing him well.”

“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when to you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?" Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. "Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that," Abdul went on. "I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once when my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, 'If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.' And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, "Don't confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.'" Sunil though that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly-the kind that could be ended as Kalu's had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he'd come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned to far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself.”