Smoke’s right eye starts to swell in the fourth, and I know he’s in trouble. This is a pretty big fight at the Taj Mahal, against Dreaded Eddie Jefferson, a California kid with machine-gun hands, and a black kid too. Smoke’s a plugger, a real old-fashioned Philly fighter, a white guy with a thick neck and thicker head.

I’d have been better off if they had amputated it, he thought.

Gene placed one hand under his knee and the other beneath his calf muscle, then hoisted his left leg out of the car. He was frustrated with the leg. He would have smacked it with his cane if it weren’t still attached to his body.

Good-for-nothing leg.

Indigo valley is painted purple with pictures.

I say that don’t right. Mr. Kale says indigo not purple. Purple’s violet and red mixed. Blue and violet mixed—that’s Indigo. He don’t like purple in his Indigo valley. I told Bill about what Mr. Kale told me in art class. Bill didn’t care what I had to say, but Bill’s my friend.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when she showed up. She was tall and dark-skinned, and called herself Cynthia. She cursed and curled her body into knots, crying out Simon’s name as though they had been lovers for years. Afterward, as she smoked in his bed, she propped herself up on one bare elbow and stared at his profile. Simon gazed at the ceiling and thought about his late wife.

It was important that Megan worked at the Perfume Counter on the second level on the East Side of the building, near the double doors, because in the morning, before the store opened, Frederick would walk in through the back room, up the powerless escalators, and see her behind the counter, her elbows on the glass display case, with the light from the rising sun falling over her.

Hannah twirled her pencil in her fingers and stared vacantly at her notebook. It was amazingly unlikely that they ever would have met in the first place, so it shouldn’t unsettle her to know she would never see him again after the semester’s end. It shouldn’t, but it did. She had been unfathomably lucky.

John didn't care what the road was called. He let his little girl name it, his little ray of sunshine. She called it Frying Pan Road. He took her to a psychologist.