Sometimes, when you're walking in New York-probably anywhere, but especially in New York because it's so crowded-you see these people, like guys in wheelchairs with stumps of legs just reaching the edge, or people with burns on their faces. Maybe their legs got blown off in a war, or someone threw acid at them. I never really thought about them. If I thought about them at all, what I thought was how to get past without them touching me. They grossed me out. But now I thought about them all the time, how one minute you can be normal-beautiful, even-and then something can happen the next minute that changes it. You can be damaged beyond repair. A freak. I was a freak, and if I had fifty, sixty, seventy years left, I'd spend them as a freak because of that one minute when Kendra put the spell on me after what I did.