“Prefects. I had learned this one. Student council types, but with superpowers. They who must be obeyed.”

“She firmly held the theory that everyone gets at least one very stupid superpower.”

“After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.”

“The best I ever got was that woman who kept having me come up to fix her TV. There was a lot of bending involved. I felt used and dirty.It’s the price you pay for being one of those weedy but good-looking types, Scarlett said. Weedy? You hurt me. I prefer tall and scrawny. Unlike my partner, who’s right behind you.”

“He had let Aunt Peg live in his house and married her, so clearly he had a thing for flaky American types who liked to sneak off in the dead of night. That was, as Ginny remembered it, how America won the Revolution in the first place. The English walked around in bright red coats in straight lines and took breaks for tea, and the Americans snuck around dressed in rags and hid in trees and stole their horses. Or something. Whatever. She had to do this-it was her birthright. It was what George Washington would have wanted.”

“I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”

“Just then, my phone started ringing. The ring must have been damaged by the water as well, so now it had a high, keening note - kind of the sound I imagine a mermaid might make if you punched her in the face.”