“Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. …Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”

“My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime.

That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister.

And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you.

When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that.

And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you.

And she believed.

When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?”

Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian.

All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now.

But I don’t have an answer for them.

How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”

Why else would she believe it?

It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.

My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.

That or Sima is insane.

There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it.

If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake.

But she doesn’t think so.

She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed.

And she’s poor now.

People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better.

It’s true.

We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma.

We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong.

But you can’t make Sima agree with you.

It’s true.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

This whole story hinges on it.

Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.”

“Imagine you’re evil.

Not misunderstood.

Not sad.

But evil.

Imagine you’ve got a heart that spends all day wanting more.

Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.

Imagine you’re like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.

Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.

Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.

Imagine you’re evil and you don’t do any of those things, but you’re like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what’s going on and you say nothing’s going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.

Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone.”

“Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.”

“Memories are tricky things.

They can fade or fester.

You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they’ll ferment and poison your brain.”

“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.”

“Maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it—maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.”

“We are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us. And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry.”

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,”

“Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?”

“If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.”

“I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me. But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.”

“In all our lives, my sister only told me her stories twice. We never compared our memories, ever. I think because where they were the same, they were painful and obvious. And where they were different–even just a little–they were so important to each of us, that we hated each other for not remembering them as we did.”

“HERE IS A LIST of foods we discovered in America: Peanut butter. Marshmallows. Barbecue sauce. (You can say, “Can I have BBQ?” to a kid’s mom at potlucks and they’ll know what you mean.) Puppy chow. (Chex cereal covered in melted chocolate and peanut butter and tossed in powdered sugar. They only give it if you win a Valentine friend.) Corn-chip pie (not a pie). (Chili on top of corn chips with cheese and sour cream (not sour).) Some mores. (They say it super fast like s’mores.) Banana puddin. (They don’t say the g. Sometimes they don’t even say the b.) Here is a list of the foods from Iran that they have never heard of here: All of it. All the food. Jared Rhodes didn’t even know what a date was.”

“They learn to hide away everything they love where you can’t touch and they won’t just hide it some place easy to find or any place in this world. They’ll create a new world with its own language and they’ll hide everything there. All the favorite jokes they won’t say around you. All the best books. The spot on the wall that looks like a keyhole. Being safe and free and comfortable. All those things, and you won’t even know they exist. You won’t know because you believe the weak can’t do anything. But hiding is something you do when you wait to get stronger.”

“You can’t waste time with dignity.”

“YOU KNOW WHY I told you all those poop stories. Because food and poop are the truest things about you. I walked past the bathroom once when Kelly J. was walking out and the smell was so foul and sour it was like she could never hide her rotten insides, no matter how pretty she is.”

“For a moment like that all the universe would have to conspire to move all its pieces and line them up just so. I think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life.”

“I won’t tell you about ___________ yet, because sometimes love has to be kept secret. If other people find out, they will attack it.”

“I said to my dad, “Are you really a Christian now?”

And he said, “Yes!” and laughed. “I’m your father. I am humanity. I’m everything to everybody.”

I didn’t say anything after that.

I guess that was my dad’s favorite myth, that he was everything to everybody.”

“Her name was Karen and Karen was kind in the way that people can be, when kindness doesn’t cost them anything.”

“The closer you get to history, it’s like the closer you get to the weave of a rug. You see a thousand thousand complications.”

“I walk home alone by the main road so the cars will see me. Sometimes the grown-ups driving by will call the police, but it’s okay because I don’t do drugs or spray paints. Walking through the woods is more dangerous because there are no adults in the woods, just other kids. And kids are dangerous.”

“They started talking–I have no idea what about. Grownies will talk sometimes in boring words about boring ideas to groom each other like apes, to let each other know they’re pals.”

“And the lesson here is that people are unlikeable. They have the irritating habit of believing they are as important as you are to the story.”

“The first thing I read are comics about Calvin and Hobbes. He is a boy who seems to hate the world as it is and love the world that ought to be. The tiger is his sane mind, which goes to sleep too much, so that he never knows what to believe. And never knows which world he is in. I like him because he speaks better than a kid.”

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov”

“A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like. A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys.”

“She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed.”