I turned to face him once more, smiling and shaking my head all the while. “It figures,” I said breathlessly, and felt the first black lines of bitterness seep into my voice. “Of course the boy who finds beauty in weeds would see it in me!”
A sudden tongue of flame burst inside his tame eyes: those twinkling stars collapsed into suns. “Stop it! You’re better than any weed or rose in the world,” he almost shouted. “You’re made of mountains and fire and all the lights of the sky, and those things can never be ugly. They’re beautiful, and they’ll always be beautiful, and so will you!”

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