Unknown

"He loved the light in his mama's kitchen. The yellow stained glass panes across the top of the windows buttered the room a soft gold—even now in the early evening with the rain coming down hard outside."

"Marion laughed. She pulled a chicken-covered with rosemary and lemon slices from the oven. "Smells good, Marion." "Stop calling me Marion." "Stop calling me Elisha." "That's your name." "And Marion's yours." I smiled, pulling a sprig of rosemary from the chicken. It had been going on like this for years. She refused to call me Ellie, so I refused to call her Mom."

"Jeremiah. Who did he go home to? Would he remember me? Had he seen it too, whatever it was that I saw when we looked at each other? What was it?"

"From my room, I could lie across my bed and watch the cars rush along Central Park West. In a hurry to get someplace. Everyone in New York is in a hurry. You see businessmen walking fast, their heads bowed, the cuffs of their pants flapping hard against their ankles. They don't look at anyone. Once I followed this man, walking so close behind him I could have been his daughter—but he never even looked over and noticed me. For two blocks I walked like that beside him. It made me sad for him—that he could walk through this world without looking left or right."

"I couldn't stop looking at him, at his smile and his hair."

"I had been staring at my program card, trying to figure out where room 301 or something was—looking from the program card to the numbers on the doors and I had run right into him, my math and science textbooks crashing to the floor. Then he was apologizing and I was apologizing and we were both bending at the same time to retrieve them. And then—we just stopped and burst out laughing."

"They asked that `cause you're with me,you know," he said, eyeing me. He looked hurt and angry all at once. "If you were with a white boy, they probably would have just smiled and kept on going."

"Two old women, walking arm in arm, eyes us. Jeremiah frowned, glaring at them."

"When Anne used to talk about being in love, she said it felt like someone wrapping you inside of them. And that's what I felt like now, like slowly I was being wrapped inside of Miah—inside his eyes, inside his voice, inside the way he talked about things."

"What's gonna happen is gonna happen. I mean, the feeling's still there even if you're covering it up."

"I could see it. In your eyes. How scared you are. You've got the kind of eyes that don't hide anything."

"He wanted more than that too—somebody deep. Somebody that could know him—know all of him—the crazy things he dreamed on stormy nights, when he woke with tears in his eyes and pulled the covers tight around him."

"Maybe this was what love felt like. I turned the empty orange juice glass around in my hand. Was it lying that I didn't tell him Jeremiah was black? Why should that matter? Why did any of it matter?"

"Each day seemed to crawl slowly into the next and the next, and some nights I couldn't sleep with the excitement of a new day—and another chance to see Jeremiah. Maybe this was what love felt like."

"Not reasons—excuses, I guess. We don't want our baby leaving the nest just yet. It makes us feel old." He stood up, reached over, and touched my cheek. "It reminds us that one day this house will be empty—no children, just two ancient people padding through it looking at pictures."

"I don't know." He looked up at his father's window. "Sometimes I feel like I don't know nothing about nothing."

"He pulled his knapsack off his shoulders and stared up at the sky. It was beautiful today, all warm and gold. The leaves had begun to change, and the trees up and down the block cast pretty shadows over everything. He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it—the ending and beginning of things."

"He found himself watching her when she wan't looking. Watching the way she used her hand to move her hair out of her face, slowly, wrapping her fingers around it and pulling it back behind her ear. The way she leaned over her notebook to write, a tiny frown between her eyebrows. And her smile—she had a sweet smile. Sweet and sad and something else too. He couldn't explain it. If anyone asked, he wouldn't be able to put into words to how he felt when Ellie looked at him and smiled. He felt something stop and start inside of him."

"where were they then--these black people who were just like us--who were equal to us? Why weren't they coming over for dinner? Why weren't they playing golf with Daddy on Saturdays or quilting with Marion on Thursdays nights? Why weren't they in our world, around us, a part of us?"

"Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits besides us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on."

"This is how the time moves—an hour here, a day somewhere, and then and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in its empty room."

"I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink—it's gone."

"Marion and my father had been right—Percy Academy did get me into a good college. When the letter came, Marion held it up proudly. "A thick envelope," she said. "You know what that means." Yes, I knew what it meant. All spring the envelopes had been coming—thin ones meant one-page rejections. Thick ones meant acceptances and more paperwork."

"Times like that, I hate white people. Then I have to ask myself, How can I hate white people and love you?" He smiled. "And I don't know how to answer that."

"I used to think my family would accept anybody," I said slowly. "No matter what color they were. i'm not so sure of that now." I looked at him and swallowed. "It scares me. I mean, a part of me doesn't want to find out."

"Sometimes he had a feeling deep, like there were certain people he'd never see again."

""Last Saturday, after they left the library, he and Ellie had been walking alone Fifth Avenue holding hands when these white boys started acting stupid--saying stuff like "jungle fever" and "who turned out the lights?" Miah had clenched his jaw and held tighter to Ellie's hand. Walk through the rain, Ellie had said."

"Maybe you think you have all the answers now because of that boy, but you don't. You'll see how your life turns around on you and sets you down in some strange other place."

"You know something? That first time when we were sitting in Central Park talking—and then you cut that Snickers bar in half and handed me that piece—I was thinking this is what I've waited forever for—you know—somebody I could talk to, somebody who got it the way you get me. And there you were, not even a foot away from me, listening and sharing your candy."

"She made him feel all right. Everytime she smiled or kissed him or called his name in the hallway, he felt it. That everything everywhere was going to be all right."

"Some mornings, there is only this in the world—Jeremiah's hand reaching for my own. There isn't Marion's warning about time making changes we can't ever anticipate. Only Miah's hand in mine and a voice much louder than Marion's—my own—saying, Take this moment and run, Ellie."

"And sometimes," Anne said softly, "there's just plain love Ellie. No reason for it, no need to explain." Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee, and grinned. "Perfect love," she said. "And what's that like?" "When you'll find it, lil sis. You'll know."

"When I was little, Anne used to talk to me all the time about love. She said sometimes it happened slowly, an investment of work and time over months and years. She said that kind of love was sort of like the stock market—you put all of yourself into it and hope for a decent return. She said there were other kinds too—the quick-fix binge love—when a person bounced from person to person without taking a bit of time out to examine what went wrong with the last one. "And then there's Marion-Edward love," she said once, sitting across from me, her fingers against her mouth the way they always were when she was thinking. "When a person thinks they know someone and then boom—one day she just up and leaves. Thing is knowing and loving are different.""

"No one at Percy said anything. It was strange the way the students seemed to turn away from it, from him and Ellie holding hands on the Percy stairs. From his arm around Ellie's shoulder as they walked through the halls. Turn away from them kissing outside their classrooms. Sometimes Miah imagined their turning away in slow motion—the eyes cast downward, the heads moving slowly above the collars of the Percy uniforms."

"He wanted to go up to his room, lie on his bed, and think about Ellie. About today in the park. About the way her lips felt against his. Different. The same. Right. And his hand over hers—the brown and the white, her tiny fingers, the silver band on her thumb, her eyes, the way they just kept on looking and looking deeper and deeper inside of him. No one had ever looked at him like that, like they wanted to know every single thing about him. Like everything he had to say mattered. Really mattered."

"Odrukudru alu ini yi mile woro."

"Aparaka ma tibi agobi."

"The Germans"

"The German language"

"An adjective or noun, of or pertaining to Germany"

"Wa de goat du, de kid falla."

"You come to drink milk an' no fe count cow."

"Vos dona, eu dona, quen botará o porco fora?"

"James Darren - Dr. Anthony "Tony" Newman"

"John Zaremba - Dr. Raymond "Ray" Swain"

"Lee Meriwether - Dr. Ann MacGregor"

"Robert Colbert - Dr. Douglas "Doug" Phillips"

"Whit Bissell - General Heywood "Woody" Kirk"

"All three variables—length, time, mass—are covered by the same Lorentz contraction [ \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}} ]... Length and the rate of clocks vary in the same direct proportion, so the formula is the same for each. Mass... varies in the inverse proportion... \scriptstyle \frac{1} {\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}."

"The speed of light can never be reached. If it were reached, the outside observer would find that the ship had shrunk to zero length, had acquired an infinite mass, and was exerting an infinite force with its rocket motors. Astronauts inside the ship would observe no changes in themselves, but they would find the cosmos hurtling backward with the speed of light, cosmic time at a standstill, every star flattened to a disk and infinitely massive."