About two months before I was born, the doctors realized there was something wrong with my face, but they didn't think it was going to be bad.  They told Mom and Dad I had a cleft palate and some other stuff going on.  They called it "small anomalies."

And then Mom got very upset and tried to get out of bed to see where they were going, but the farting nurse put her very big arms on Mom to keep her down in the bed.  They were practically fighting because Mom was hysterical and the farting nurse was yelling at them to stay calm, and then they both started screaming for the doctor.  

It'll be a bit of a schlep, though.  The A train down to Eighty-Sixth, then the crosstown bus all the way to the East Side.  Takes an hour that way but it's just a fifteen minute drive.  

Any saying or ground rule that can motivate you.  Basically, a precept is anything that helps guide us when making decisions about really important things.

I stopped letting anyone take pictures of me a while ago.  I guess you could call it a phobia.  No, actually, it's not a phobia.  It' an "aversion," which is a word I just learned in Mr. Browne's class.  I have an aversion to having my picture taken.  There, I used it in a sentence.  

Coming home after four weeks felt very strange at first.  I remember very vividly stepping through the door and seeing August running over to welcome me home, and for this tiny fraction of a moment, I saw him not the way I've always seen him, but the way other people see him.  

"Double-stunned.  Stung.  Flabbergasted.  No words formed in my mouth"

Use context clues to find the definition of the words in red: "One thing I've learned after being a middle-school director for twenty years: there are almost always more than two sides to every story.  Although I don't know the details, I have an inkling about what may have sparked the confrontation with James."

"It's okay, I'm not mad," I say, thinking the tears are about me. "I honestly don't care if you are mad," she said spitefully.  

"What's with you lately? You are moody, and taciturn, and secretive."

Everyone was congratulating all the actors, patting them on the back.  It was that crazy backstage theater mayhem where sweaty actors stand euphoric while people come worship them for a few seconds.  

"Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation."

Mom was right about the mosquitoes: there were tons of them.  But luckily I had spritzed myself before I left the cabin, and I wasn't eaten alive like some of the other kids were.  

When I went back to school the next day, the first thing I noticed was that there  was a big shift in the way things were.  A monumental shift.  A seismic shift.  Maybe a cosmic shift.