“Dylan hurried the comic book into his binder. He’d bought it on Court Street at lunchtime and debated allowing it to be seen inside the school, a breach of general good sense.”

…

“Walk these streets with pockets empty, you’re an idiot, asking for it.”

….

“Homeroom was a place for honing silence in a theater of noise and so the Italian girl and Dylan never spoke. As for Arthur Lomb, Dylan supposed he and the other boy had been kept apart intentionally by some unseen pitying intelligence, to avoid making both more conspicuous in their resemblance. This was a policy Dylan endorsed heartedly, whether it existed outside of his own brain or not.”

…..

“That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.

And that’s what he wanted to be to her, spoiled, stained with blackness.

Racist bitch.”

- Jonathan Lethem, “The Fortress of Solitude”