“I like the fact that she thinks. The human face is so legible that it sometimes seems possible to watch their thoughts, the way you can see fish moving in a lake by the little ripples they make on the surface.”

“There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.”

“Sometimes, all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.”

“Sometimes I know things before they happen. Sometimes I can see a scene in my head. Like watching a movie, and then it will happen. I think, did I make it happen? Or did I just see it somehow?”

“Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …”

“I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross-legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother'sPTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina,and led right to me."She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.”