Tommy Boy Quotes

And you, Tommy” the boy said, lowering his voice. “You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here and asking me to leave with you. A lot of bloody nerve. The sight of you makes me sick

Tommy might be a boy in outer appearance but he was 500 years my senior and significantly more powerful than me. "We" had a serious problem really meant, "I" had a serious problem.

Her magic formula for dealing with children is ignoring all faults and accenting tiny virtues. She says, "Instead of telling Tommy day in and day out that he is the naughtiest boy in the United States of America, which could very well be true, take an aspirin and comment on his neatly tied shoes. Almost anybody would rather be known for expert shoe-tying than for kicking the cat." She always tells whiners how charming they are--bullies how brave--bad sports how good--sneaks how honest!

Little girls fear being a princess that was never rescued but little boys fear being a prince that was too late.

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

As Mike Roberts watched Tommy enter the building, he could not imagine that the boy was taking his last steps in the free world. The rest of his life would be behind prison walls.

I'm supposed to a man who never blows his composure A boy trapped in a war, forced to be a solider The weight of the world just put on top of my shoulders But if there's one thing I know for sure It's that my mind has had its exposure And my emotional turmoil has finally had its closure

Sure. If you hadn’t gone through everything you’ve gone through, there’s no way in the world you’d be ready to hear what I’ve come here to teach you. Life’s had to break you down so you could be rebuilt better. And, boy, just wait until you see the breakthroughs you’re about to experience. Before you know it, you’ll be the rock star of this whole book company,” Tommy said as his voice rose, full of passion.

And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper ... and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times—the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example—when it had been difficult. But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn’t count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the “youthful wards” that he routinely assigned to his heroes—a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life—represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.

It isn’t always the fastest man who wins the race or the strongest man who wins the fight,” Tommy continued. “It’s the one who wants it more than the other guy.

Not all monsters are filled with darkness.' She wanted him to understand this so badly that her voice trembled. He didn't even hesitate. 'This one is.' She allowed herself a moment to admire Tommy, the way he stood so resolute, like a knight charging after the monster. He just didn't get that this fight wasn't his to wage. 'Exactly so,' she finally said. Of course Tommy would think she talking to him. He exhaled as though relieved and the start of a smile eased the tension around his lips. By the time he realized that she'd spoken the words to someone over his shoulder, it was already too late.

Gustavo Tiberius speaking." “It’s so weird you do that, man,” Casey said, sounding amused. “Every time I call.” “It’s polite,” Gus said. “Just because you kids these days don’t have proper phone etiquette.” “Oh boy, there’s the Grumpy Gus I know. You miss me?” Gus was well aware the others could hear the conversation loud and clear. He was also aware he had a reputation to maintain. “Hadn’t really thought about it.” “Really.” “Yes.” “Gus.” “Casey.” “I miss you.” “I miss you too,” Gus mumbled into the phone, blushing fiercely. “Yeah? How much?” Gus was in hell. “A lot,” he said truthfully. “There have been allegations made against my person of pining and moping. False allegations, mind you, but allegations nonetheless.” “I know what you mean,” Casey said. “The guys were saying the same thing about me.” Gus smiled. “How embarrassing for you.” “Completely. You have no idea.” “They’re going to get you packed up this week?” “Ah, yeah. Sure. Something like that.” “Casey.” “Yes, Gustavo.” “You’re being cagey.” “I have no idea what you mean. Hey, that’s a nice Hawaiian shirt you’ve got on. Pink? I don’t think I’ve seen you in that color before.” Gus shrugged. “Pastor Tommy had a shitload of them. I think I could wear one every day for the rest of the year and not repeat. I think he may have had a bit of a….” Gus trailed off when his hand started shaking. Then, “How did you know what I was wearing?” There was a knock on the window to the Emporium. Gus looked up. Standing on the sidewalk was Casey. He was wearing bright green skinny jeans and a white and red shirt that proclaimed him to be a member of the 1987 Pasadena Bulldogs Women’s Softball team. He looked ridiculous. And like the greatest thing Gus had ever seen. Casey wiggled his eyebrows at Gus. “Hey, man.” “Hi,” Gus croaked. “Come over here, but stay on the phone, okay?” Gus didn’t even argue, unable to take his eyes off Casey. He hadn’t expected him for another week, but here he was on a pretty Saturday afternoon, standing outside the Emporium like it was no big deal. Gus went to the window, and Casey smiled that lazy smile. He said, “Hi.” Gus said, “Hi.” “So, I’ve spent the last two days driving back,” Casey said. “Tried to make it a surprise, you know?” “I’m very surprised,” Gus managed to say, about ten seconds away from busting through the glass just so he could hug Casey close. The smile widened. “Good. I’ve had some time to think about things, man. About a lot of things. And I came to this realization as I drove past Weed, California. Gus. It was called Weed, California. It was a sign.” Gus didn’t even try to stop the eye roll. “Oh my god.” “Right? Kismet. Because right when I entered Weed, California, I was thinking about you and it hit me. Gus, it hit me.” “What did?” Casey put his hand up against the glass. Gus did the same on his side. “Hey, Gus?” “Yeah?” “I’m going to ask you a question, okay?” Gustavo’s throat felt very dry. “Okay.” “What was the Oscar winner for Best Song in 1984?” Automatically, Gus answered, “Stevie Wonder for the movie The Woman in Red. The song was ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You.’” It was fine, of course. Because he knew answers to all those things. He didn’t know why Casey wanted to— And then he could barely breathe. Casey’s smile wobbled a little bit. “Okay?” Gus blinked the burn away. He nodded as best he could. And Casey said, “Yeah, man. I love you too.” Gus didn’t even care that he dropped his phone then. All that mattered was getting as close to Casey as humanely possible. He threw open the door to the Emporium and suddenly found himself with an armful of hipster. Casey laughed wetly into his neck and Gus just held on as hard as he could. He thought that it was possible that he might never be in a position to let go. For some reason, that didn’t bother him in the slightest.

Tommy is a friend of Mr. Joyce.” “Boy, I’ll say I am,” said young Tom. “Papa, we never knew Balzac, did we?” “No. He was before our time.” “Nor Gautier? I found two swell ones by them at home too. The Droll Stories and Mademoiselle de Maupin. I don’t understand Mademoiselle de Maupin at all yet but I am reading it over to try to and it’s great. But if they weren’t friends of ours I think they would expel me sure if I read them to the boys.

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

First was a lone cyclist, in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded colour, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired. Tommy faced Dick, saying: 'I think Nicole wants a divorce - I suppose you'll make no obstacles?' A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the victims of accident and defeat.

The boys are afraid of Opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. Something about how brief and direct she is. Maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical. It’s to prepare them for a world made for Native people not to live but to die in, shrink, disappear. She needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not Native. It’s because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself. She’s no-nonsense with them because she believes life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you into tiny unrecognizable pieces.

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic.

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind", But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind, There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind, O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

It was no easy matter to induce her to think and to feel that the curly-headed boy, who stood by her side, and even leaned on her lap; who was loved by little Tommy, and who loved little Tommy in turn; sustained to her only the relation of a chattel. I was more than that, and she felt me to be more than that.

Tommy noticed my sullenness. “Hey. Greg.” He was tapping this Transformer-y robot thing he’d affixed to his dashboard. It looked a little bit like an armored crab—the cheap, Happy Meal–ish toy that a boy might stick to his bedroom windowsill. “Be careful, Greg,” Tommy said, as he bobbled his dashboard toy. “Be careful or monster will get you.

White boys thought the world of themselves, thought the world was themselves, and that anything otherwise was out of place, needed to be noticed or ignored.

She scans the field for the boys. It's a blur. She should probably get glasses, probably should've gotten glasses a long time ago. She would never tell anyone this, but she enjoys the distance being a blur.

But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn’t count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father

People don't want any more than a little story they can bring back home with them. To tell their friends and family around the dinner table. To talk about how they saw a Real Native American Boy. On a train. That they still exist.

Увидев немыслимые прибыли, которые получают Gap и Tommy Hilfiger благодаря своим связям с миром музыки, звукозаписывающие компании и сами начинают активно заниматься брэндингом. Они не только поддерживают работающих музыкантов с помощью изощренных технологий ко-брэндинга, но и сами группы все больше воспринимаются как брэнды и в качестве таковых проходят проверку на рынке — Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N' Sync, All Saints и другие — все это уже не группы, а брэнды.

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada

And you, Tommy,” the boy said, lowering his voice. “You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here and asking me to leave with you. A lot of bloody nerve. The sight of you makes me sick.” Thomas was stunned silent. Nothing anyone had ever said had hurt so much. Nothing.

Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.

She'd prepared herself for any amount of awkwardness or anger, but no for a hug that was probably the longest she'd ever received from a boy, one of those hugs that made it clear how much the person hugging you was in need of a hug, or believed YOU to be in need of a hug.

No. I’d want to stay with him till I died. But to see it with Davy is different.” “We have to think about how he feels,” his father told him. “And what’s important to him.” “I know,” young Tom said hopelessly. “But to me it’s just Davy. I wish the world wasn’t the way it is and that things didn’t have to happen to brothers.” “I do too,” Thomas Hudson said. “You’re an awfully good boy, Tommy. But please know I would have stopped this long ago except that I know that if David catches this fish he’ll have something inside him for all his life and it will make everything else easier.

I guess I said no because I was scared.” I stare out the window and run my finger along the glass, making an M for Martinez. “Of Tommy?” “No. I like Tommy. It’s not that. It’s scary when it’s real. When it’s not just thinking about a person, but, like, having a real live person in front of you, with, like, expectations. And wants.” I finally look at Peter, and I’m surprised by how hard he’s paying attention; his eyes are intent and focused on me like he’s actually interested in what I’m saying. “Even when I liked a boy so much, loved him even, I would always rather be with my sisters, because that’s where I belong.

Then Israel Finch got to his feet and pointed the light at Dolly. He told Tommy to hold her arms, and Tommy roared as if they were the funniest words in his reduced language. Realizing his cut wasn’t mortal, Israel slapped Dolly across the mouth, told her she was in for deep regret now, boy, and reaching forth his strong smelly hands rent open the front of her sweater. That, Dolly said, is when she would’ve started to give up inside, had she not looked over Israel’s shoulder and seen Dad coming. Keep in mind he ought not’ve been visible at all; there were no lights on but the flashlight, which was aimed at Dolly. She said Dad’s face coming toward them was luminous of itself, glowing and serene, the way you’d suppose an angel’s would be, that it rose up behind Israel Finch like a sudden moon, and when Tommy Basca saw it he was so startled he dropped her right down on her bottom. She said Dad was as silent, those next moments, as he was incandescent; he made no sound except a strange whistling, which turned out, of course, to be the broom handle, en route to any number of painful destinations. What was odd, she said, was how the boys weren’t even up to the job of running away—Tommy went screeching to his knees before the first blow landed, and Israel prostrated himself and moaned as though the devil had hold of his liver. The two of them just lost their minds, Dolly said, while her own reaction was nearly as insensible; she suddenly could not stop laughing. Here was Dad, his face still lit though now even the flashlight had gone out, smiling (Dolly said) though his eyes looked terribly melancholy, whacking Finch and Basca every second or two while the pair of them shrieked in no English you’d recognize—Dolly said the laughter just flooded through her and came not only from relief, as you might surmise, but from a reckless and holy sort of joy she had never felt before, not even while cheerleading.

At one point he got tripped, and picking himself up, placed the ball on the ground to take the free kick himself. As the boys spread out in anticipation, I saw Arthur H. – one of his biggest tormentors – a few yards behind Tommy’s back, begin mimicking him, doing a daft version of the way Tommy was standing over the ball, hands on hips. I watched carefully, but none of the others took up Arthur’s cue. They must all have seen, because all eyes were looking towards Tommy, waiting for his kick, and Arthur was right behind him – but no one was interested. Tommy floated the ball across the grass, the game went on, and Arthur H. didn’t try anything else.

Someone had gotten into bed with him. Deenie had gotten into bed with him. Only it felt too small to be Deenie. It felt more like a— He scrambled out of bed, landed awkwardly on the floor, and looked over his shoulder. It was Deenie’s little boy, Tommy. The right side of his skull was caved in. Bone splinters protruded through bloodstained fair hair.

I think fairies are all awfully sad,” she said. “Poor fairies.” “This was sort of funny though,” David said. “Because this worthless man that taught Tommy backgammon was explaining to Tommy what it meant to be a fairy and all about the Greeks and Damon and Pythias and David and Jonathan. You know, sort of like when they tell you about the fish and the roe and the milt and the bees fertilizing the pollen and all that at school and Tommy asked him if he’d ever read a book by Gide. What was it called, Mr. Davis? Not Corydon. That other one? With Oscar Wilde in it.” “Si le grain ne meurt,” Roger said. “It’s a pretty dreadful book that Tommy took to read the boys in school. They couldn’t understand it in French, of course, but Tommy used to translate it. Lots of it is awfully dull but it gets pretty dreadful when Mr. Gide gets to Africa.” “I’ve read it,” the girl said. “Oh fine,” David said. “Then you know the sort of thing I mean. Well this man who’d taught Tommy backgammon and turned out to be a fairy was awfully surprised when Tommy spoke about this book but he was sort of pleased because now he didn’t have to go through all the part about the bees and flowers of that business and he said, ‘I’m so glad you know,’ or something like that and then Tommy said this to him exactly; I memorized it: ‘Mr. Edwards, I take only an academic interest in homosexuality. I thank you very much for teaching me backgammon and I must bid you good day.

I never ought to, while I have you to cheer me up, Marmee, and Laurie to take more than half of every burden," replied Amy warmly. "He never lets me see his anxiety, but is so sweet and patient with me, so devoted to Beth, and such a stay and comfort to me always that I can't love him enough. So, in spite of my one cross, I can say with Meg, 'Thank God, I'm a happy woman.'" "There's no need for me to say it, for everyone can see that I'm far happier than I deserve," added Jo, glancing from her good husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her. "Fritz is getting gray and stout. I'm growing as thin as a shadow, and am thirty. We never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bed-clothes, though he's set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can't help using their expressions now and then." "Yes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one," began Mrs. March, frightening away a big black cricket that was staring Teddy out of countenance. "Not half so good as yours, Mother. Here it is, and we never can thank you enough for the patient sowing and reaping you have done," cried Jo, with the loving impetuosity which she never would outgrow. "I hope there will be more wheat and fewer tares every year," said Amy softly.

We get in and I start the car. “Are you going to be good to Lani?” I ask. I think of Tommy Cook, a pale boy with psoriasis; we used to tie him to a chair with bungee cords and put him in the middle of the road, then hide. Few cars would actually come down Rainbow Drive, but when they did, it always surprised me that the drivers would slow their vehicles and swerve around the chair. None of them ever got out of their cars to help Tommy; it was as though they were in on the prank. I don’t know how Tommy managed to let us catch him more than once. Maybe he liked the attention. “I’ll try,” Scottie says. “But it’s hard. She has this face that you just want to hit.” “I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of Tommy, but realize I’m not supposed to empathize. “What does that mean?” I ask. “The kind of face that you want to hit. Where did you get that?” Sometimes I wonder if Scottie knows what she’s saying or if it’s something she recites, like those kids who memorize the Declaration of Independence. “It’s something Mom said about Danielle.” “I see.” Joanie has carried her juvenile meanness into her adult life. She sends unflattering pictures of her ex-friends to the Advertiser to put in their society pages. She always has some sort of drama in her life, some friend I’m not supposed to speak to or invite to our barbecues, and then I hear her on the phone gossiping about the latest scandal in an outraged and thrilled voice. “You are going to die,” I’ll hear her say. “Oh my God, you will just die.” Is this where Scottie gets it? By watching her mother use cruelty as a source of entertainment? I feel almost proud that I have made these deductions without the blogs and without Esther, and I’m eager to tell Joanie about all of this, to prove that I was capable without her.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

Look, Tommy,” Kurt said, “let Kasey learn how to deal with what she’s going through. Let her make her own mistakes. You can hate boys from afar, and when she brings one home, you just explain that if he hurts her, you’ll make him vanish. That’s how I did it for our daughter.” “And now she lives in Canada,” Petra said. “Okay, maybe don’t tell him that you’ll make him vanish,” Kurt conceded. “Turns out daughters don’t like their dates being threatened.” I laughed again. “This is the oddest conversation I’ve ever woken up to. Tommy, just let Kasey figure it out. You’re there for when she can’t. And if anyone ever does hurt her . . . well, you’re a werewolf—you’ll figure something out.” Tommy smiled. “I love my devious-minded friends.” “ ‘Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,’ ” Kurt said. Petra practically launched herself on her husband, kissing him on the cheek. “You quoted Star Wars. I love you.” Kurt looked down at his wife and, without smiling, said, “I know.” Petra’s smile lit up her face like a firework.

When Tommy asked me to speak to the students, I immediately told him no. I was finally comfortable talking to people individually about my faith, but I still didn’t want anything to do with public speaking. But then I thought about the idea for three or four days and it was really nagging at me. I called Tommy back and told him to line it up. When I arrived at the classroom a few days later, there were about fifty kids there. I stood in the front of the class and told them I was a hunter and fisherman, but I loved the Lord, and I told them why. I went through my entire testimony and shared the Gospel with them. I was so nervous talking to them that every time I tried to turn a page in my Bible, I ripped about three pages! My hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t stop ripping pages! I kept looking up to see if anyone had noticed how nervous I was. I couldn’t wait for my talk to end. But after I was finished talking, a young boy came up to me. He had tears in his eyes. “Thanks, mister,” he said. “I really needed to hear that.” I couldn’t believe God had used a simple guy like me to have this kind of impact on a kid.

Listen to what I’m tellin’ you, boy! This is why we couldn’t tell you the truth—’cause you wasn’t lookin’ for the truth. You was lookin’ for confirmation of what you already believed. The truth was starin’ you in the face and you didn’t want it. How the hell could I get away wit’ killin’ somebody and authorities never come? Huh? I know we in the country, but we ain’t on Mars! That don’t make no sense! But you couldn’t swallow the truth that I had done changed, so you held on to the ignorance you always believed—that I was a mean, nasty, evil woman. That’s what’s wrong wit’ the world. We don’t let people change.” She paused, frowning. “Sometimes, when people change, we change ’em right back into what they was ’cause the change don’t fit how we know ’em. So people get tired of fightin’ to make other folks see ’em differently. Most stop tryin’.” TL

Okay, boys. Dogs.” Maximus paused for dramatic effect. “Such magnificent animals. Andy and Billy know this.” They nodded. Maximus looked at Tommy. “And you, boy?” “Oh yes, sir.” Maximus continued with an upbeat tone. “They are selfless and have a keen sense of loyalty. They give unconditionally of themselves and are guileless. They are easily trained, as they always want to please the master. One of the most important things they teach us is the joy of living in the moment. To live life without being bogged down by unnecessary distractions of potential future consequences or troubled by past experiences. They know what makes them happy and they pursue it without fear of being judged, as they are nonjudgmental themselves. And on top of all that they can make us laugh.” Maximus grinned mischievously. “Time for some amusement. Alpha-Sleep. Beta-Sleep.” Andy and Billy remained

The front door is locked—what’s up with that?” “Logan fixed the lock,” I tell her. Her bright red, heart-shaped mouth smiles. “Good job, Kevin Costner. You should staple the key to Ellie’s forehead, though, or she’ll lose it.” She has names for the other guys too and when her favorite guard, Tommy Sullivan, walks in a few minutes later, Marlow uses his. “Hello, Delicious.” She twirls her honey-colored, bouncy hair around her finger, cocking her hip and tilting her head like a vintage pinup girl. Tommy, the fun-loving super-flirt, winks. “Hello, pretty, underage lass.” Then he nods to Logan and smiles at me. “Lo . . . Good morning, Miss Ellie.” “Hey, Tommy.” Marlow struts forward. “Three months, Tommy. Three months until I’m a legal adult—then I’m going to use you, abuse you and throw you away.” The dark-haired devil grins. “That’s my idea of a good date.” Then he gestures toward the back door. “Now, are we ready for a fun day of learning?” One of the security guys has been walking me to school ever since the public and press lost their minds over Nicholas and Olivia’s still-technically-unconfirmed relationship. They make sure no one messes with me and they drive me in the tinted, bulletproof SUV when it rains—it’s a pretty sweet deal. I grab my ten-thousand-pound messenger bag from the corner. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Elle—you should have a huge banger here tonight!” says Marlow. Tommy and Logan couldn’t have synced up better if they’d practiced: “No fucking way.” Marlow holds up her hands, palms out. “Did I say banger?” “Huge banger,” Tommy corrects. “No—no fucking way. I meant, we should have a few friends over to . . . hang out. Very few. Very mature. Like . . . almost a study group.” I toy with my necklace and say, “That actually sounds like a good idea.” Throwing a party when your parents are away is a rite-of-high-school passage. And after this summer, Liv will most likely never be away again. It’s now or never. “It’s a terrible idea.” Logan scowls. He looks kinda scary when he scowls. But still hot. Possibly, hotter. Marlow steps forward, her brass balls hanging out and proud. “You can’t stop her—that’s not your job. It’s like when the Bush twins got busted in that bar with fake IDs or Malia was snapped smoking pot at Coachella. Secret Service couldn’t stop them; they just had to make sure they didn’t get killed.” Tommy slips his hands in his pockets, laid back even when he’s being a hardass. “We could call her sister. Even from an ocean away, I’d bet she’d stop her.” “No!” I jump a little. “No, don’t bother Liv. I don’t want her worrying.” “We could board up the fucking doors and windows,” Logan suggests. ’Cause that’s not overkill or anything. I move in front of the two security guards and plead my case. “I get why you’re concerned, okay? But I have this thing—it’s like my motto. I want to suck the lemon.” Tommy’s eyes bulge. “Suck what?” I laugh, shaking my head. Boys are stupid. “You know that saying, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?—well, I want to suck the lemon dry.” Neither of them seems particularly impressed. “I want to live every bit of life, experience everything it has to offer, good and bad.” I lift my jeans to show my ankle—and the little lemon I’ve drawn there. “See? When I’m eighteen, I’m going to get this tattooed on for real. As a reminder to live as much and as hard and as awesome as I can—to not take anything for granted. And having my friends over tonight is part of that.” I look back and forth between them. Tommy’s weakening—I can feel it. Logan’s still a brick wall. “It’ll be small. And quiet—I swear. Totally controlled. And besides, you guys will be here with me. What could go wrong?” Everything. Everything goes fucking wrong.

Just above Tommy’s face were the Maiden and the Troll, two of his oldest wall people. The troll lived in a cave deep in the woods. He was big (Tommy knew the troll was even bigger than his daddy, and if the troll told his daddy to sit down and shut up, he would in a second), and he looked scary, with his little eyes and crooked teeth like fangs, but he had a secret. The secret was that he wasn’t scary at all. He liked to read, and play chess by mail with a gnome from over by the closet wall, and he never killed anything. The troll was a good troll, but everyone judged him by his looks. And that, Tommy knew, was a mean thing to do, though everyone did it. The maiden was very beautiful. Even more beautiful than Tommy’s mommy. She had long blonde hair that fell in heavy curls to her waist, and big blue eyes, and she always smiled even though her family was poor. She came into the woods near the troll’s cave to get water from a spring, for her family. The spring bubbled out of Tommy’s wall right next to where his hand lay when he was asleep. Sometimes she only came and filled her jug and left. But other times she would sit awhile, and sing songs of love lost, and sailing ships, and the kings and queens of Elfland. And the troll, so hideous and so kind, would listen to her soft voice from the shadows just inside the entrance of his cave, which sat just below the shelf where Tommy kept his favorite toys and books. Tommy felt bad for the troll. He loved the maiden who came to his spring, but she would never love him. He knew from listening to his parents and the stuff they watched on television when he was supposed to be asleep that beautiful people didn’t love ugly people. Ugly people were either to laugh at or to be frightened of. That was how the whole world worked. Tommy rolled over on his side, just a small seven year old boy in tan cargo shorts and a plain white T-shirt. He let his eyes drift over the bedroom wall, which was lumpy in some places and just gone in others. There was a part of the wall down near the floor where he could see the yellow light of the naked bulb down in the basement, and sometimes he wondered what might live down there. Nothing good, of that he was sure.

How come you never dated anybody?” I shrug. “I don’t know…because nobody ever asked?” “Bullshit. I know for a fact that Martinez asked you to homecoming and you said no.” I’m surprised he knows about that. “What is it with you guys all calling each other by your last name?” I ask him. “It’s so--” I struggle to find the right word. “Effected? Affected?” “Don’t change the subject.” “I guess I said no because I was scared.” I stare out the window and run my finger along the glass, making an M for Martinez. “Of Tommy?” “No. I like Tommy. It’s not that. It’s scary when it’s real. When it’s not just thinking about a person, but, like, having a real live person in front of you, with, like, expectations. And wants.” I finally look at Peter, and I’m surprised by how hard he’s paying attention; his eyes are intent and focused on me like he’s actually interested in what I’m saying. “Even when I liked a boy so much, loved him even, I would always rather be with my sisters, because that’s where I belong.” “Wait. What about right now?” “Right now? Well, I don’t like you that way so…” “Good,” Peter says. “Don’t go falling for me again, okay? I can’t have any more girls in love with me. It’s exhausting.” I laugh out loud. “You’re so full of yourself.” “I’m kidding,” he protests, but he’s not.

The man who had him pinned kicked him over again and pointed down at the tire. "Stay down, you little bastard, or we'll rape your mum and skin her alive." Chris clamped his hands over Michael's ears. When Dean edged the truck forwards, Tommy's eyes jumped from his face. "Mum! Mummy! Help me, Mummy! Mum!" The engine bellowed, Tommy cried, Marie screamed, Frank roared, and Chris' pulse thumped in his ears. Locked in a maniacal fit, Dean cackled at the sky, his pointy nose and gaunt face making him look like a satanic Mr. Punch. He edged forward again. As Michael fought against Chris' restraint, he eased off a little. Should he just let him go? Were the images in his mind worse than those outside? When the truck moved forward again, the thick treads of the huge tires biting into the back of Tommy's head, he squeezed tightly once more. No mind could create anything worse than that. Chris looked away too.  Tommy's scream was so shrill Chris thought all of the glass in the cul-de-sac would crack, and he fought harder against his thrashing son to keep him restrained. When he felt like he couldn't fight the boy's will any more, he let go.  Instead of looking outside, Michael fell to the floor in a ball, scuttled beneath some blankets, and covered his ears. From beneath the sheets, Chris heard his small voice singing, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Nudging his boy, Chris waited for him to resurface and put a finger to his lips again. They couldn't afford for the looters to hear them no matter how much it took his son away from their dark reality. The sound of a beeping horn was accompanied by Dean howling and laughing, the vehicle's engine releasing a war cry under the weight of his heavy foot. The cacophony of chaos outside got louder. Frank wailed, Marie let out louder screams, the engine roared, the horn beeped, Dean laughed, and Tommy shrieked. Looking outside again, Chris kept his eyes away from Tommy. Instead, he watched George. If there was anyone who would save them, it was him.  Crunch! Crash!  The truck dropped by six inches. Tommy stopped screaming.  When Dean cut the engine, silence settled over the cul-de-sac, spreading outwards like the thick pool of blood from Tommy's crushed head. Marie's face was locked in a silent scream. Frank slumped further and shook with inaudible sobs. The men, even the weasel with the tennis racket, stood frozen. None of them looked at the dead boy.  Turning away from the murder, Chris looked down to find Michael staring back at him. What could he say to him? Tommy was his best friend. Then, starting low like a distant air-raid siren, Marie began to wail.  After rapidly increasing in volume, it turned into a sustained and brutal cry as if she was being torn in two. Chilled

You're Miss F's boyfriend?" Danny looked up in disbelief, his gaze following Jim around the room. "You're real?" Tommy echoed the same surprise. "Dude, I thought she was some sad old lady like my mom, making up stories about her dead boyfriend." "Shut up, Tommy." Jim paused near her desk. "You talked about me? You said I'm your boyfriend?" "Dead boyfriend," Danny corrected. "Shut up." Natalie and Jim silenced the frightened vandals in unison. "We were reading Romeo and Juliet," she explained, trying to diminish the importance of the boys' nervous rambling that had revealed far more than she cared to. "Talking about love and tragedy." "They were like, from rival gangs," Tom informed Jim unnecessarily. "Enough, Tommy." The seventeen year-old chose now to remember something she'd taught in class? "These are the two boneheads who've been giving you grief?" Natalie nodded."I thought I'd handled it." Jim holstered his gun and pulled out his phone. "I don't know if I'm flattered to learn that you claimed to love me, or pissed off to hear that you think of us as a tragedy.

Among other jobs that we did, my brother Bill and I were shoe shine boys in Jersey City and Hoboken during the World War II years. We went from tavern to tavern shining shoes for ten cents and hopefully a generous tip. The Hoboken waterfront bristled with starkly looming, grey hulled Liberty ships. Secured to the piers facing River Street, they brandished their ominous cannons towards what I thought was City Hall. An unappreciated highlight was when I shined Frank Sinatra’s shoes at a restaurant on Washington Street, just west from the Clam Broth House. There was no doubt but that Hoboken was an exciting place during those years. Years later I met Frank at Jilly's saloon, a lounge on West 52d Street in Manhattan, for a few drinks and a little fun around town. Even though I was an adult by then, he still called me “kid!” It was obvious that Frank Sinatra enjoyed friendly relations with Mafia notables such as Carlo Gambino, “Joe Fish” Fischetti and Sam Giancana. Meyer Lansky was said to have been a friend of Sinatra’s parents in Hoboken. During this time Sinatra spoke in awe about Bugsy Siegel and was in an AP syndicated photograph, seen in many newspapers, with Tommy “Fatso” Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel, Fratianno. Little wonder that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept their eye on Sinatra for almost 50 years. A memo in FBI files revealed that Sinatra felt that he could be of use to them. However, it is difficult to believe that Sinatra would have become an FBI informer, better known as a “rat.” It was in May of 1998 when Sinatra, being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told his wife Barbara, “I’m losing.” Frank Sinatra died on May 14th at 82 years of age. It is alleged that he was buried with the wedding ring from his ex-wife, Mia Farrow, which she slid unnoticed into his suit pocket during his “viewing.” Aside from his perceived personal and public image, Frank Sinatra’s music will shape his enduring legacy for decades to come. His 100th birthday was celebrated at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Somehow Frank will never age and his music will never fade….

HEROES ARE DESIGNED TO TRANSFORM At the beginning of a story, the hero is usually flawed, filled with doubt, and ill-equipped for the task set before them. The guide aids them on their journey, rife with conflict. The conflict begins to change the character, though. Forced into action, the hero develops skills and accrues the experience needed to defeat their foe. Though the hero is still filled with doubt, they summon the courage to engage, and in the climactic scene defeat the villain, proving once and for all they have changed, that they are now competent to face challenges and are better versions of themselves. The story has transformed them. This same character arc, by the way, is the arc for The Old Man and the Sea, Pride and Prejudice, Pinocchio, Hamlet, Sleeping Beauty, and Tommy Boy. It’s the arc of almost every popular story we can name. Why? Because it’s our story. Feelings of self-doubt are universal, as is the desire to become somebody competent and courageous. And all of this matters when it comes to branding our products and services. A few important questions we have to ask ourselves when we’re representing our brand are: Who does our customer want to become? What kind of person do they want to be? What is their aspirational identity?

Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Szabó The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami

The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine

Most of the boys at Belvedere had already moved on from the Jordan Catalano school of fashion, but not Tommy.

Sean had always felt uncomfortable being referred to as a boy, or as a young man. But, and he knew this was the biggest but, feeling nonbinary did not mean he wasn’t a man who directly benefited from being a man. Men were a secret cult. To be a boy being groomed to be a man was to be joining a secret cult against women, and against anything not squarely a man—square-jawed shape into the square-jawed hole. Not every single boy. Not every single man. Not Sean. He didn’t think. But he knew he was a part of it, and could not fully recuse himself from participation in all that it included. In an ideal world, Sean would be referred to as they/them by everyone without anyone having to ask or explain. In an ideal world, there would be better, more inclusive, kinder language for everyone.

Tommy clutched the letter in his hands for a few minutes before sliding the envelope back into his coat pocket, worrying about whatever change the future might hold. He knew well enough that Manhattan would always send signals, if only its residents could stop and feel them. The city itself breathes in with every tragedy: every obituary in the New York Times; every jackhammer upon its streets; every time a girl leaves a boy; every slight transgression that takes place within its invisible walls. And every time New Yorkers breathe a collective sigh of relief, every time they find peace in themselves, every time they find each other again, every time they bring new life into the world or enjoy a good book, or put a fresh coat of paint on an old cracked wall. Manhattan exhales. The city breathes in. The city breathes out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Holes start to close fast.” He threaded the bar quickly through his left nipple, hissing at the slight sting of pain, which made him hard. And Prophet watched the whole thing with complete and utter interest. “Dude, that had to hurt.” “That’s the whole point.” His voice was rough, his hands were shaking, and, in tandem, his head was beginning to throb. He refused to tell Prophet any of it. But Prophet was next to him, taking the remaining piercings from him. “I’ll do it.” “No.” “Why?” Because I’m gonna get hard if you touch me. “Fine.” Prophet capped the piercing Tom had already put in. Then he tugged the other nipple toward him and slid the piercing in, capping it expertly while Tommy watched. He didn’t bother to hide his erection through the towel. He knows you’re already hard. “Okay?” Prophet asked, and Tom could only nod yes. “Towel off.” Tom dropped it. Wanted to say something like, I have to be hard for the piercings to go in, but he couldn’t. And Prophet didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t know how insulted he should be about that. “You’re sure?” Tom asked. “Yeah.” Prophet stared at him, and he didn’t want to make a bigger deal of the whole thing, so he grabbed his dick, positioned it up against his stomach, and let Prophet slide the piercings in. He tried to ignore the fact that Prophet had dropped to his knees and that his mouth was inches from Tom’s dick, but he couldn’t help but watch, fascinated, as Prophet threaded the piercings in, waiting for Tom to catch his breath between each one. When Prophet finished with all five, Tom pulled the towel back around him loosely and went to the bed. He sat back against the pillows, and Prophet watched him silently for a few moments before saying, “You’re your very own whipping boy. How’s that work?

Prophet’s brows raised. He looked between Tom and Ray. Ray shrugged and nodded at Tom, like he was planning on simply walking away from this. And no, that wouldn’t fly at all, so he asked Ray, “You’re not going to fight for me?” “You want me to?” Ray asked. “I think you should, yes,” Prophet told him seriously. And with that, Tommy actually goddamn rumbled, a volcano ready to fucking blow. Prophet didn’t care. He was out of control and just wanted to roll with it. “Try it.” Tom pushed Prophet—pushed him out of the way to go toe to toe with Ray. “See what you get.” “Or we could teach him a lesson,” Ray offered. “Okay, hold the phone.” Prophet stared between Ray and Tom, because that wasn’t how this was supposed to go. At all. And how was it supposed to go? He told himself to shut the fuck up, because he never planned shit like this. Knowing outcomes took the fun out of things, mainly because it raised the stakes. Upped the risks. “I like the idea,” Tom was saying. “I most certainly don’t,” Prophet informed them and scanned the bar for another guy to flirt with who wouldn’t turn on him. Tom ignored Prophet in favor of asking Ray, “What do you have in mind?” “I can get pretty creative. Boys like this usually need it.” Ray looked at Prophet like he was some kind of prey. “I’m no one’s boy,” Prophet muttered irritably. Ray smiled. Like he thought Prophet was lying. “Bring him to the back,” he told Tom before he walked in that direction. “I’m not going to the back,” Prophet called after him. Tom motioned to the bartender for another shot, which he promptly handed to Prophet. “Drink.” “You’re not drunk at all, are you?” “Nope.” Prophet

Squashed behind The Cloud of Unknowing we discovered a pocket-size spiral notebook with a day-by-day account of the time Justin had stayed with her and her husband after Tommy’s death. The writing was legible though it required effort (this was before she took her calligraphy course), but Justin was ecstatic and asked if he could have the little notebook. “This is my history,” he said. Later, after he had deciphered every last word: “Boy, was I loved.

So we suspect that the reformed tiger is also a caricature of a little girl, and the original attributes of a tiger, its uncontrolled, impulsive, and ferocious qualities represent those tendencies within the child which are undergoing a transformation. We notice, too, that Laughing Tiger’s mistress is more severe and demanding than the persons who have undertaken the civilizing of the little girl Jan, and we confirm the psychological truth that the most zealous crusaders against vice are the reformed criminals; the strength of the original impulse is given over to the opposing wish. But let’s get back to imagination and its solutions for childhood problems. Jan’s imaginary tiger gives her a kind of control over a danger which earlier had left her helpless and anxious. The little boy who stalks tigers and bears with his homemade tommy gun and his own sound effects is coming to terms with the Tiger problem in his own way. (I have the impression that little boys are inclined to take direct action on the tiger problem, while the work of reforming tigers is left to the other sex which has long demonstrated its taste and talent for this approach.) Another very satisfactory approach to the tiger problem is to become a tiger. A very large number of small children have worked their way out of the most devilish encounters, outnumbered by ferocious animals on all sides, by disguising themselves as tigers and by out-roaring and out-threatening the enemy, causing consternation, disintegration, and flight in his ranks. Under

The New England wilderness March 1, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees She had no choice but to go to him. She set Daniel down. Perhaps they would spare Daniel. Perhaps only she was to be burned. She forced herself to keep her chin up, her eyes steady and her steps even. How could she be afraid of going where her five-year-old brother had gone first? O Tommy, she thought, rest in the Lord. Perhaps you are with Mother now. Perhaps I will see you in a moment. She did not want to die. Her footsteps crunched on the snow. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The Indian handed Mercy a slab of cornmeal bread, and then beckoned to Daniel, who cried, “Oh, good, I’m so hungry!” and came running, his happy little face tilted in a smile at the Indian who fed him. “Mercy said we’d eat later,” Daniel confided in the Indian. The English trembled in their relief and the French laughed. The Indian knelt beside Daniel, tossing aside Tommy’s jacket and dressing Daniel in warm clean clothing from another child. Nobody in Deerfield owned many clothes, and if she permitted herself to think about it, Mercy would know whose trousers and shirt these were, but she did not want to think about what dead child did not need clothes, so she said to the Indian, “Who are you? What’s your name?” He understood. Putting the palm of his hand against his chest, he said, “Tannhahorens.” She could just barely separate the syllables. It sounded more like a duck quacking than a real word. “Tannhahorens,” he said again, and she repeated it after him. She wondered what it meant. Indian names had to make a picture. She smiled carefully at the man she had thought was going to burn her alive as an example and said, “I’ll be right back, Tannhahorens.” She took a few steps away, and when he did nothing, she ran to her family. Her uncle swept her into his arms. How wonderful his scratchy beard felt! How strong and comforting his hug! “My brave girl,” he whispered, kissing her hair. “Mercy, they won’t let me help you.” In a voice as childish and puzzled as Daniel’s, he added, “They won’t let me help your aunt Mary, or Will and Little Mary either. I tried to help your brothers and got whipped for it.” He stammered: Uncle Nathaniel, whose reading choices from the Bible were always about war, and whose voice made every battle exciting. He needed her comfort as much as she needed his. “Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, “if I had done better, Tommy and Marah--” “Hush,” said her uncle. “The Lord set a task before you and you obeyed. Daniel is your task. Say your prayers as you march.” In a tight little pack behind Uncle Nathaniel stood her three living brothers. How small and cold they looked. Sam lifted his chin to encourage his sister and said, “At least we’re together. Do the best you can, Mercy. So will we.” They stared at each other, the two closest in age, and Mercy thought how proud their mother would be of Sam. “Mercy,” cried her brother John, panicking, “you have to go! Go fast,” he said urgently. “Your Indian is pointing at you.” Tannhahorens was watching her but not signaling. He isn’t angry, thought Mercy. I don’t have to be afraid, but I do have to return. “Find out your Indian’s name,” she said to her brothers. “It helps. Call him by name.” She took the time to hug and kiss each brother. How narrow their little shoulders; how thin the cloth that must keep them from freezing. She had to go before she wept. Indians did not care for crying. “Be strong, Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, touching the strange collar around his neck. “Don’t tug it,” he said wryly. “It’s lined with porcupine quill tips. If I don’t move at the right speed, the Indians give my leash a twitch and the needles jab my throat.” The boys laughed, pantomiming a hard jerk on the cord, and Mercy said, “You’re all just as mean as you ever were!” “And alive,” said Sam. When they hugged once more, she felt a tremor in him, deep and horrified, but under control.

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees By the time Mercy had sorted this out, her three brothers were gone. She panicked. “Sam!” she screamed. “John! Benny!” She ran from group to group, darting behind sledges, racing among the dogs, circling the fires. “Sam! John!” What was the matter with her? How could she have stayed separate from them? Why had she not kicked Tannhahorens in the shins, as Ruth would have, and marched with her brothers no matter what he said? Ruth was right, he was nothing but an Indian! O Father! she thought. O Mother! I let you down again. I didn’t protect Tommy. I didn’t save Marah or Stepmama or the baby. And now the boys are gone. On her second screaming circle of the camp, Tannhahorens caught her. “Boys go,” he said. “But are they all right? I didn’t say good-bye! You never let me talk to them at all! I don’t even know their masters’ names!” A new and even more horrifying thought struck Mercy. It tore the wind from her lungs and her voice broke. “Will my brothers and I go to the same place? Will I see them again?” Poor Father, come home to find his entire family ripped away in a night. Father would comfort himself that Mercy was taking care of the boys--and he would be wrong. Tannhahorens had fewer English words than Mercy had Mohawk. He could not understand this outpouring. He steered her back to his possessions. “Raquette,” he said. Mercy jumped in front of him, blocking his path. He was hung with weapons in preparation for departure: knives, tomahawk, hatchet, gun, two bows, quiver of arrows. But something new hanging from Tannhahorens’ chest gave her pause. A Catholic cross. Although in her whole life, Mercy had seen only one spoon and a belt buckle made of silver, she knew this cross to be silver. She wrenched her eyes from its beauty. It would be a sin to find a cross beautiful. Religion must be heart and soul, not scraps of metal. Tannhahorens pushed her along in front of him. “Raquette,” he said irritably. “Raquette?” she begged. “Is that your town? Is that Sam’s master’s name? Are the boys together? Is Same going to be able to watch out for John and Benny?” This time, ragged trousers and a torn stained coat blocked Tannhahorens’s way The Indian looked harshly at the Englishman in front of him, and Mercy wished she had learned words like please. But Tannhahorens walked on and left them together. “Oh, Uncle Nathaniel!” she said, and they wrapped their arms around each other. He held her tightly. He had to clear his throat several times to find his voice. “Your brothers are not together,” he said, “but they seemed all right. They were not afraid. Benny’s Indian has a sled and he will ride as he did yesterday. John’s with five other English, all adults. They will watch for him. And Sam is with the Kellogg girls. He’ll be busy taking care of Joanna and Rebecca.” Her three brothers, going in three directions in the hands of strangers. “They took my Will and my Mary in the last band,” said her uncle. “I have some hope. The Indians treat my children tenderly. When nobody else had a morsel to eat, their masters fed them.” Sam. John. Benny. Will. Little Mary. Gone.

The New England wilderness March 1, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees The Indian next to Mr. Williams interrupted him roughly. “We kill. You tell.” Mr. Williams ceased to pray. “Joe Alexander escaped last night,” he said. “If anyone else tries to escape, they will burn the rest of us alive.” Burn alive? Burn innocent women and children because one young man flew from their grasp? Her Indian stood some distance away amid the other warriors. He was now wearing a vivid blue cloth coat of European design. In one hand he held his French flintlock, and over his shoulder hung his bow and a full otter-skin quiver--actually, the entire dead otter, complete with face and feet. His coat hung open to show a belt around his waist, from which hung his tomahawk and scalping knife. His skin was not red after all, but the color of autumn. Burnished chestnut. His shaved head gleamed. He looked completely and utterly savage. He might sorrow for a dead brother warrior, but grief would make him more likely to burn a captive, not less likely. Mercy imagined kindling around her feet, a stake at her back, her flesh charring like a side of beef. Beside her, Eben seemed almost to faint. Mercy had the odd thought that she, an eleven-year-old girl, might be stronger than he, a seventeen-year-old boy. The English were silent, entirely able to believe they might be burned. The first person to move was Mercy’s Indian. Sharply raising one hand, bringing the eyes of all upon him, he pointed to Mercy Carter. She was frozen with horror. His finger beckoned. There could be no mistake. The meaning was come. There was no speech and no movement from a hundred captives and three hundred enemies. It was the French Mercy hated at that moment. How could they stand by and let other whites be burned alive? She had no choice but to go to him. She set Daniel down. Perhaps they would spare Daniel. Perhaps only she was to be burned. She forced herself to keep her chin up, her eyes steady and her steps even. How could she be afraid of going where her five-year-old brother had gone first? O Tommy, she thought, rest in the Lord. Perhaps you are with Mother now. Perhaps I will see you in a moment. She did not want to die. Her footsteps crunched on the snow. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The Indian handed Mercy a slab of cornmeal bread, and then beckoned to Daniel, who cried, “Oh, good, I’m so hungry!” and came running, his happy little face tilted in a smile at the Indian who fed him. “Mercy said we’d eat later,” Daniel confided in the Indian. The English trembled in their relief and the French laughed.

Deerfield, Massachusetts February 29, 1704 Temperature 0 degrees We will freeze to death, thought Mercy. Why go to the trouble of carrying a hundred pairs of moccasins when they won’t make a fire? Her Indian knelt and, with his bare hands, scooped out a hole in a snowbank. She expected him to store his plunder in the cavity. He had to make a lot of hand motions before she understood that this was her shelter for the night. Not a house, nor a bed, nor even a stable. A hole in the snow. Mercy wanted to raise her head to the skies and howl like a dog. But she wanted to survive. There must be no more bodies along this terrible trail. “First, may I look for my brothers?” She held up four fingers. “No,” said the Indian, and motioned her into the cave, tucking Daniel in after her. Mercy would have felt much better if she could have rested her eyes on Tommy and John and Sam and Benny. From her hole she watched the others settle in for the night. Eben’s Indian collected the older boys: Eben, the oldest Kellogg boy, the two Sheldon boys and Joe Alexander, who was in his twenties but looked very young. They were pinioned to the ground a dozen yards from where Mercy was curled. For Eben, however, his Indian made a cradle of spruce boughs. He wrapped a leather rope around Eben’s wrists and linked the cord to his own. If Eben moved, his captor would know it. The rest were made to lie on open snow. There was nothing between them and the weather. No walls, no roof, no parent.

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.' 'Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.' 'But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?

If Ralphie’s form of adventuresome was grunting out, “Hold onto somethin’,” for foreplay then, sure, he was one wild boy.

Now we suspect a parallel development here. The transformation of a tiger into an obedient and quiescent beast is probably a caricature of the civilizing process which the little girl is undergoing. The rewards and deprivations, the absurd demands which are made upon Laughing Tiger make as little sense to us as we view this comedy as the whims and wishes of the grown-up world make to a little girl. So we suspect that the reformed tiger is also a caricature of a little girl, and the original attributes of a tiger, its uncontrolled, impulsive, and ferocious qualities represent those tendencies within the child which are undergoing a transformation. We notice, too, that Laughing Tiger’s mistress is more severe and demanding than the persons who have undertaken the civilizing of the little girl Jan, and we confirm the psychological truth that the most zealous crusaders against vice are the reformed criminals; the strength of the original impulse is given over to the opposing wish. But let’s get back to imagination and its solutions for childhood problems. Jan’s imaginary tiger gives her a kind of control over a danger which earlier had left her helpless and anxious. The little boy who stalks tigers and bears with his homemade tommy gun and his own sound effects is coming to terms with the Tiger problem in his own way. (I have the impression that little boys are inclined to take direct action on the tiger problem, while the work of reforming tigers is left to the other sex which has long demonstrated its taste and talent for this approach.) Another very satisfactory approach to the tiger problem is to become a tiger. A very large number of small children have worked their way out of the most devilish encounters, outnumbered by ferocious animals on all sides, by disguising themselves as tigers and by out-roaring and out-threatening the enemy, causing consternation, disintegration, and flight in his ranks. Under

My baby is four years old. I know that calling her a baby is really only a matter of semantics now. It’s true, she still sucks her thumb; I have a hard time discouraging this habit. John and I are finally confident that we already enjoy our full complement of children, so the crib is in the crawlspace, awaiting nieces, nephews, or future grandchildren. I cried when I took it down, removing the screws so slowly and feeling the maple pieces come apart in my hands. Before I dismantled it, I spent long vigils lingering in Annie’s darkened room, just watching her sleep, the length of her curled up small. What seems like permanence, the tide of daily life coming in and going out, over and over, is actually quite finite. It is hard to grasp this thought even as I ride the wave of this moment, but I will try. This time of tucking into bed and wiping up spilled milk is a brief interlude. Quick math proves it. Let me take eleven years - my oldest girl’s age - as an arbitrary endpoint to mothering as I know it now. Mary, for instance, reads her own stories. To her already I am becoming somewhat obsolete. That leaves me roughly 2.373 days, the six and half years until Annie’s eleventh birthday, to do this job. Now that is a big number, but not nearly as big as forever, which is how the current moment often seems. So I tuck Annie in every night. I check on Peter and Tommy, touch their crew-cut heads as they dream in their Star Wars pajamas, my twin boys who still need me. I steal into Mary’s room, awash with pink roses, and turn out the light she has left on, her fingers still curled around the pages of her book. She sleeps in the bed that was mine when I was a child. Who will she grow up to be? Who will I grow up to be? I think to myself, Be careful what you wish for. The solitude I have lost, the time and space I wish for myself, will come soon enough. I don’t want to be surprised by its return. Old English may be a dead language, but scholars still manage to find meaning and poetry in its fragments. And it is no small consolation that my lost letters still manage, after a thousand years, to find their way to an essay like this one. They have become part of my story, one I have only begun to write. - Essay 'Mother Tongue' from Brain, Child Magazine, Winter 2009

The challenge was to ensure that the device - which worked by sampling “white noise” generated by a neon gas discharge tube - was genuinely random. The key (without going into too much detail) was to use two such devices for each number that needed to be generated, subtracting the output from the second from the output from the first, in case one of them went wrong. This meant - we thought - that 32 devices were needed to generate the requisite 16-figure number. Then our youngest lab boy suggested that we could achieve the same result with just 16 devices, pairing the first with the second, the second with the third, the third with the fourth, and so on, instead of having 16 discrete pairs. At a stroke, the cost was halved. The genius of Tommy Flowers - or part of it - was to run his team in a way that allowed such suggestions to be both made and heard

Sean had always felt uncomfortable being referred to as a boy, or as a young man. But, and he knew this was the biggest but, feeling nonbinary did not mean he wasn't a man who directly benefited from being a man. Men were a secret cult. To be a boy being groomed by a man was to be joining a secret cult against women, and against anything not squarely a man - square-jawed shape into the square-jawed hole.

There are long passages about your grandfather, detailing his life after he fled from the chaos of the Sand Creek Massacre as a boy. You will go back to the library to learn about the massacre. Take in what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. You will understand another form of inheritance then. Feel it.

Maybe we're not the Disneyland types,' Opal says, and walks away from the cage, seeming to want to leave the conversation, perhaps because their mom came up, or because of the way it'd brought the boys to mind, something possibly sweet they hadn't done, or some possibly sweet Disney way they couldn't have been.

Like that easy-spread peanut butter, white-boy confidence he’d seen so many kids at school walk around with like they had their dad’s jacket on and no one could tell, or like white men out there in the world ruling everything like it was the most natural shit in the world to make decisions and seem to give zero fucks about who it affects.

think it was because they cost sixty dollars, but Mama would never admit that there was something we couldn’t afford. She’s a good one for making excuses when it comes to spending money.) Sherilyn’s bustling around the food table in a zebra-print tankini. The boys—Kyle, Jack, Tommy, and Hugh Sasser—are in

We all stop what we’re doing to stare at him. His kid brothers, Shig and Minnow, exchange a sick glance like they already knew. Wonder if they already tried to talk him out of it, not that you can talk Masaru out of anything once he’s made up his mind. I feel like he’s socked me in the gut, and if you’ve seen Mas, you know how much that’d hurt. How can he do this to us? To me? The U.S. government put us here, and he’s going to go fight for them? I mean, I knew Mas fancied himself an all-American boy, but I didn’t think he’d betray the rest of us for a country that clearly doesn’t give a shit about him. “Really?” Tommy asks.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami

There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out: ‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’ ‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling. ‘I’ve thought over every imaginable way of getting it too,’ continued Tuppence. ‘There are only three! To be left it, to marry it, or to make it. First is ruled out. I haven’t got any rich elderly relatives. Any relatives I have are in homes for decayed gentlewomen! I always help old ladies over crossings, and pick up parcels for old gentlemen, in case they should turn out to be eccentric millionaires. But not one of them has ever asked me my name—and quite a lot never said “Thank you.”’ There was a pause. ‘Of course,’ resumed Tuppence, ‘marriage is my best chance. I made up my mind to marry money when I was quite young. Any thinking girl would! I’m not sentimental, you know.’ She paused. ‘Come now, you can’t say I’m sentimental,’ she added sharply. ‘Certainly not,’ agreed Tommy hastily. ‘No one would ever think of sentiment in connection with you.’ ‘That’s not very polite,’ replied Tuppence. ‘But I dare say you mean it all right. Well, there it is! I’m ready and willing—but I never meet any rich men! All the boys I know are about as hard up as I am.’ ‘What about the general?’ inquired Tommy. ‘I fancy he keeps a bicycle shop in time of peace,’ explained Tuppence. ‘No, there it is! Now you could marry a rich girl.’ ‘I’m like you. I don’t know any.’ ‘That doesn’t matter. You can always get to know one. Now, if I see a man in a fur coat come out of the Ritz I can’t rush up to him and say: “Look here, you’re rich. I’d like to know you.”’ ‘Do you suggest that I should do that to a similarly garbed female?’ ‘Don’t be silly. You tread on her foot, or pick up her handkerchief, or something like that. If she thinks you want to know her she’s flattered, and will manage it for you somehow.’ ‘You overrate my manly charms,’ murmured Tommy. ‘On the other hand,’ proceeded Tuppence, ‘my millionaire would probably run for his life! No—marriage is fraught with difficulties. Remains—to make money!’ ‘We’ve tried that, and failed,’ Tommy reminded her. ‘We’ve tried all the orthodox ways, yes. But suppose we try the unorthodox. Tommy, let’s be adventurers!’ ‘Certainly,’ replied Tommy cheerfully. ‘How do we begin?’ ‘That’s the difficulty. If we could make ourselves known, people might hire us to commit crimes for them.’ ‘Delightful,’ commented Tommy. ‘Especially coming from a clergyman’s daughter!’ ‘The moral guilt,’ Tuppence pointed out, ‘would be theirs—not mine. You must admit that there’s a difference between stealing a diamond necklace for yourself and being hired to steal it.’ ‘There wouldn’t be the least difference if you were caught!’ ‘Perhaps not. But I shouldn’t be caught. I’m so clever.’ ‘Modesty always was your besetting sin,’ remarked Tommy. ‘Don’t rag. Look here, Tommy, shall we really? Shall we form a business partnership?’ ‘Form a company for the stealing of diamond necklaces?’ ‘That was only an illustration. Let’s have a—what do you call it in book-keeping?’ ‘Don’t know. Never did any.’ ‘I have—but I always got mixed up, and used to put credit entries on the debit side, and vice versa—so they fired me out. Oh, I know—a joint venture! It struck me as such a romantic phrase to come across in the middle of musty old figures. It’s got an Elizabethan flavour about it—makes one think of galleons and doubloons. A joint venture!’ ‘Trading under the name of the Young Adventurers, Ltd.? Is that your idea, Tuppence?’ ‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I feel there might be something in it.

I can get a hell of a good look at a T-bone steak by sticking my head up a bull’s ass, but I’d rather take the butcher’s word for it—Tommy Boy.

The hands pulled at his fingers with ferocious strength, and someone shouted his name again. He didn’t want to open his eyes, didn’t want to let in whatever lay in the darkness beyond, but it was overpowering, a tidal surge between the cracks of his hand. Fingers pulled at his, cold and strong, breaking through his grasp, and he screamed and lashed out. Linda fell backward onto the bedroom floor. Her back connected with the edge of the bed, knocking the box spring and mattress crooked. Her nightgown was askew, hiked up above her hips from the force of the fall, her underwear exposed between splayed legs. Her face was a mask of horror. Tommy stood at the edge of the bed, just where that dark boy had stood, only Tommy was crying and covering his mouth. “You’re scaring us! Stop, please!” he gulped again and again in run-on sentences. Only Jessica was silent, unaffected by what Dan realized had been a nightmare. She combed the hair of her doll softly, as if ready to fall back asleep. “Goddammit, Dan,” Linda said, her words spat out with an indignant rage. “What’s the matter with you?

I hate this juice! I hate this place! I hate this life! I hate being Tommy Tomkins!

Likin a boy, wanting to be public with that like, bein all he-ey or PDA is very grave for ppl like us secrets r quaint. Privacy is on its last leg.

Tommy Boy saves his father’s company. Rudy finally gets to play football for Notre Dame. Erin Brockovich wins the court case. The third part of your one-liner should release all the tension you created in the first section.

While I’m out working with Tommy Quinn, we get chatting about a session, a few nights previous, in a local pub called The Hill. It gets its name from the plain fact that it sits on top of a hill. The conversation moves on to the state of rural Ireland, and rural everywhere for that matter. He’s lived here in Knockmoyle for all of his life, so his opinions on the subject hold weight with me. He asks me what technology I think had the most dramatic impact on life here when he was growing up. I state what I feel are obvious: the television, the motor car and computers. Or electricity in general. Tommy smiles. The flask, he says. I ask him to explain. When he was growing up in the 1960s, he and his family would go to the bog, along with most of the other families of the parish, to cut turf for fuel for the following winter. They would all help each other out in any way they could, even if they didn’t always fully get on. Cutting turf in the old ways, using a sleán, is hard but convivial work, so each day one family would make a campfire to boil the kettle on. But the campfire had a more significant role than just hydrating the workers. As well as keeping the midges away, it was a focal point that brought folk together during important seasonal events. During the day people would have the craic around it as the tea brewed, and in the evenings food would be cooked on it. By nightfall, with the day’s work behind them, the campfire became the place where music, song and dance would spontaneously happen. Before the night was out, one of the old boys would hide one of the young lads’ wheelbarrows, providing no end of banter the following morning.