How everybody else ended up with these lives, seemingly just in the course of the narrative, and they're still the same exact person they always were. I mean, don't pet the polar bear, it's not attractive in the fucking slightest, but I do feel a lot of sympathy for those guys. They make good friends, if you don't expect much, and they often end up very romantic, which can be a nice quality in (other) people. I do wonder what one would look like if he somehow got fixed. Never met one who did. But you keep hoping.

I would not cry about Will, except maybe out of shame for having sex with him. I might cry about the mom, and that seems pretty tough at the end of the day. What I know I would be crying about -- what every person in this house probably cries about from time to time -- is feeling so alone in that house. Edward hates her, Sofia hates everybody, Mia's competitive, Julian's butthurt, Robert is a compromised and gaping maw of grief and need and Calpurnia probably thinks she's nuts. Who's left? Nobody. Just poor little maid's daughter Joanna, on the stairs, all alone. Not one thing, not the other, not belonging but not the enemy, neither rich nor poor, neither family nor not-family, just like her entire life. Just like that last night with Vivian, when she said all those awful things and Joanna realized she'd been alone all along.

I liked that book Wicked a lot, and I liked the last book in that series, but I never really gravitated too strongly to any of Gregory Maguire's other novels. I love his YA and, most of all, his books for children. But I remember so strongly -- like it's a bruise -- this scene in Confessions Of An Ugly Stepsister where the Stepmother takes her daughter, the title character, aside. They only have one pair of skates between them, the two daughters who are not Cinderella. And the mom pulls this shit:

"Look, and see how it is: The rich have skates and warm cloaks and there's a carriage converted to an ice boat! They can enjoy this oddness and take new pleasure in it. And the poor suffer even harder. Warmth is scarce and food is absent. You can't live long on ice and snow."

"So are we rich or poor?" asks Iris.

"One skate to your name? You tell me," says Margarethe.

"Balance very carefully, my dear. Very carefully indeed."