"There's a lot of girls here," I agreed and that itself was odd to me. I'd never really spent any time around girls before here, unless we're counting Sal and I spent at least half my time with her thinking she was a boy. And I had really only met some of the girls who lived here, but I liked Beverly. She was pretty and she had been kind to me and she'd shown me the best ways to sneak out of this place, even if I hadn't used any of them yet.

"There wasn't any girls where I came from," I admitted. "It was all boys. We all lived together, all slept in this same... same place."

I knew it was weird that we'd lived in a tree. I saw the way people looked at me when I talked about it. I had already stopped bringing it up, because no one else had ever lived in a tree. At least not in the way I had, under its roots in a giant, sprawling room.