Downloadable Sister Quotes

Oh, don’t be afraid of dreams,” a voice said right next to me. I looked over. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find the homeless guy from the rail yard sitting in the shotgun seat. His jeans were so worn out they were almost white. His coat was ripped, with stuffing coming out. He looked kind of like a teddy bear that had been run over by a truck. “If it weren’t for dreams,” he said, “I wouldn’t know half the things I know about the future. They’re better than Olympus tabloids.” He cleared his throat, then held up his hands dramatically:   “Dreams like a podcast, Downloading truth in my ears. They tell me cool stuff.”   “Apollo?” I guessed, because I figured nobody else could make a haiku that bad. He put his finger to his lips. “I’m incognito. Call me Fred.” “A god named Fred?” “Eh, well…Zeus insists on certain rules. Hands off, when there’s a human quest. Even when something really major is wrong. But nobody messes with my baby sister. Nobody.” “Can

I stared back, wishing I could download my memory onto a DVD and play it for Officer Quinlan. But I couldn't. All I could do was watch and hope my sister didn't end up like me.

In the end, my sisters went along with what I wanted—mostly because I framed this as one of Mom’s dying wishes. It was my job to give the CD to the funeral director—to Adam. I downloaded the song from the Wizard of Oz soundtrack on iTunes. As the service began, he played it over the speaker system. Unfortunately it wasn’t “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” It was the Munchkins, performing “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

People really liked [the iPad] because . . . they could look things up really quickly in class, but also . . . people were getting really distracted. Like, my sister had an iPad and she said that her and her friends’ texts were blocked but they had school emails. And they would sit in class and pretend to be researching but really they were emailing back and forth just because they were bored—or they would take screenshots of a test practice sheet and send it out to their friends that hadn’t had the class yet. But my sister also said that even when she and her friends were just trying to study for a test, “they would go and print everything that they had on their iPads,” because studying was made a lot more difficult because of all the other distractions on the iPad, all the other apps they could download.