Meg Medina Quotes

When I look up, I'm surprised to find myself in front of the old building. My feet must have gone on autopilot. I'm like one of those African elephants that finds her way home, no matter how far she's roamed.

In face, all I have left of my father is his last name – and I think that's only because Ma couldn't stand the shame of leaving FATHER'S NAME blank on my birth certificate. What if the hospital people thought she was the kind of woman who couldn't remember the names of the men she slept with?

Nothing ends. There is only transformation, ugly as it may be.

Take care not to listen to anyone who tells you what you can and can't be in life.

Growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way
you can see where you came from but can't go back.

SKANK is scribbled in ballpoint pen on my desk. I don't exactly know why my heart starts to thump. It's not like there aren't messages and other handiwork all over this school. Take auditorium seat J-8. I found out during last week's Expectations of Excellence assembly that it's got a faded image of a penis carved on the armrest. No one likes to sit in the Pecker Chair for an assembly. People make fun of you the whole day after that. Ask Rob.

I can't get Yaqui Delgado out of my mind. Plenty of girls shake their junk. How is that enough to make somebody hate you? It's crazy.

You know where this Yaqui girl is going to be in a few years if she doesn't change? She'll still be there, same as always in her old neighborhood
a nobody with nothing. And guess what? That's her worst fear.

Cruz has never been my favorite person, I'll give you that. But an enemy? There's no sense i having those if we can help it" -Papi

Papi chose to be invisible today so you won't ever have to be.

How can you say bad things about someone you don't know?" I shout. "How can you hate a stranger? Why do you have to pick on people?" she's not better than Yaqui. It's like everywhere there's a bully in my face.

Son unas cualquieras, she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They're her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys' touches.

I am frightened, too,' he says. 'We all are. But we are the Suarez family, Merci. We are strong enough to face this together.

It was Ma who first noticed my body changing, but she wasn't exactly tactful about my getting cuerpo. "Put on a bra already, Piddy," she said after she noticed a man on the bus gawking at my chest one day. "You can't go around with two loose onions in your shirt for all the boys to stare at," she snapped, like it was my fault that the man had helped himself to the show.

When I write now, I pretend I'm holding hands with the old me. I try to make sense of all those questions for her ...