This is the best night of my life," Raffy says, crying. "Raffy, half our House has burnt down," I say wearily. "We don't have a kitchen." "Why do you always have to be so pessimistic?" she asks. "We can double up in our rooms and have a barbecue every night like the Cadets." Silently I vow to keep Raffy around for the rest of my life.
I grew up in the kitchen, mostly with my grandfather, my mother and my aunt Raffy.
Teresa, Teresa. Have we taught you nothing?" Raffy says in an irritated voice. "It's war. You go in and you hunt him down until he realises that he's made a mistake.
Coffee?" Santangelo calls down to us. We both look up. He,Ben, and Raffy are hanging over the side. "Is it espresso?" Anson Choi asks behind us. "Freshly percolated," Ben answers. "You should see the gadgets they have up here." Anson Choi aims a begging look at Griggs. "You want to sell out over a coffee?" Griggs asks him with disgust. "They've got muffins as well," I tell them. "Double chocolate chip. His mum made them." Griggs gets up and holds out a hand to me. "Truce.
What happens when she's not my memory anymore? What happens when she's not around to tell me about his belt leaving scars across my two-year-old brother's face or when he whacked her so hard that she lost her hearing for a week? Who'll be my memory?" Santangelo doesn't miss a beat. "I will. Ring me." "Same," Raffy says. I look at him. I can't even speak because if I do I know I'll cry but I smile and he knows what I'm thinking.
Don't you ever touch my car again," Santangelo says with the same fury he had on his face when Jonah Griggs made comments about his mother. Raffy touches the car with her finger in a very dramatic way. "You've just made our hit list," he says, getting a hanky out of his pocket and cleaning off some imaginary mark.
There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.
My mother painted and wrote. She always had a painting in progress on an easel in the kitchen, so our house always smelled like oil paint. At night, she wrote after she'd put my sisters and me to bed, and the sound of her typing was our lullaby.
If I have been guilty of no violation of law, why am I hunted up and down continually like a partridge upon the mountains? Why am I threatened with the tar barrel? Why am I waylaid every day, and from night to night, and my life in jeopardy every hour?
Every night, my girlfriend comes home from work, and she brings with her a houseplant. She's like, 'Anthony, I had to pick this up. We need a houseplant in our apartment.' And every night, I make her return it. I say, 'No way, baby. You can't take care of a houseplant. You couldn't even keep your baby alive.'
And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives, Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake, How if our waking life, like that of sleep, Be all a dream in that eternal life To which we wake not till we sleep in death
I watch Raffy as she removes the pickles from her hamburger and hands them over to Santangelo without them exchanging a word and I realize again there is more to that relationship than spelling bees and being enemies. These people have history and I crave history. I crave someone knowing me so well that they can tell what I'm thinking.
In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.
What do you think?" he asks. "I hate them," I say. I can almost smell the blood, the dirt, the unnatural breath of the mutt. "All I do is go around trying to forget the arena and you've brought it back to life. How do you remember these things so exactly?" "I see them every night," he says.
The head nerd of the Cadets is my partner and when it's over he asks me for my number. I'm very flattered and he looks a bit crestfallen when I say no. "It's because they don't have coverage out here," Griggs tells him. "No," I say, looking up at Griggs. "It's actually because my heart belongs to someone else." And if I could bottle the look on his face, I'd keep it by my bedside for the rest of my life.
Every single night our soul is taken, and every single night the Angel asks before bringing it back, "Ya Allah what about this one?" "Do You want to send it back?" Do You want to pull the plug or should we keep the Ruh (soul)?" And every night Allah gives permission to the Angel to let us live one more time."
When I was 4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and told my parents there was a witch crying outside in the boxwood bushes. I didn't know who she was or why she was crying, but I was terribly upset.