Picture Us in the Light: Chapters 21–28

by Kelly Loy Gilbert
High school senior Danny Cheng is grappling with his identity as an artist, the death of a classmate, and a painful crush on his best friend. When he finds evidence that his parents are hiding a painful secret, his determination to uncover the truth will change his life forever.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Prologue–Chapter 2, Chapters 3–6, Chapters 7–12, Chapters 13–20, Chapters 21–28
40 words 13 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. impervious
    not admitting of passage or capable of being affected
    The cop’s a small white guy, shorter than I am and thinner, too, but I can feel how impervious he is to me, how the force of every strong need or feeling I’ve ever had in my life would glance right off him.
  2. painstaking
    characterized by extreme care and great effort
    And then, painstakingly and clumsily, because he so rarely does it, he cooks me dinner.
  3. cinch
    pull, fasten, or tie something tightly
    I close my eyes and try to breathe past that feeling like a belt cinched around my chest, wait for relief.
  4. unequivocally
    in an unambiguous manner
    Failure always makes him uncomfortable; he always tries to gloss over it in anyone else and stamp it out in himself. But this apartment is unequivocally failure.
  5. artful
    marked by skill or cunning in achieving a desired end
    Even furious there’s an almost aggressive perfection to the way he holds himself—impeccable clothes, hair artfully arranged, a chiseled profile that’s highlighted, somehow, by his anger.
  6. fleeting
    lasting for a markedly brief time
    For the hundredth time, I think fleetingly how nice it must be to be him.
  7. superimpose
    place on top of
    When news comes one day when you’re nineteen months old of a mass knife attack in Xuzhou, it’s the neighbor whose face your grandfather superimposes over the assailant’s.
  8. coronary
    of or relating to the heart
    You’re back home, almost inside your door, coming down the hallway (him pushing your stroller, you walking next to him, running your hands against the wall and thinking about the birds), when a clot builds in his coronary artery.
  9. pro bono
    done for the public good without compensation
    “They don’t have money for a lawyer.”
    “You could try to find someone to take their case pro bono, maybe.”
  10. stint
    an unbroken period of time during which you do something
    A four-hour stint on public transit is clearly beyond her, so we're getting an Uber.
  11. conceivably
    within the realm of possibility
    I can’t put myself hours away by plane when it could mean, conceivably, that something could happen to them while I’m gone.
  12. transfixed
    having your attention fixated as though witchcraft
    She takes a few steps closer, transfixed, and puts her hand over her mouth as she takes in the collection, the gallery lights they have shining on each piece, the placards with my name.
  13. placard
    a sign posted in a public place
    She takes a few steps closer, transfixed, and puts her hand over her mouth as she takes in the collection, the gallery lights they have shining on each piece, the placards with my name.
  14. reverent
    feeling or showing profound respect or veneration
    “Oh, Daniel,” she whispers, almost reverently.
  15. coddle
    treat with excessive indulgence
    “The Li children—they grow up so coddled,” she says. They have everything. But you—”
  16. throes
    violent pangs of suffering
    Hu had vanished—his parents, in the throes of dementia, were confused by his absence, sometimes forgetting he was gone at all and incoherent when my parents tried to speak to them—and no one from the factory knew where he’d gone.
  17. destitute
    poor enough to need help from others
    At the orphanage where Hu had brought my sister the staff had acted confused, claiming not to remember her, then claiming the baby had been dropped off by her destitute father and released to an aid worker.
  18. implore
    beg or request earnestly and urgently
    She reached out a hand to my mother, imploring.
  19. scour
    examine minutely
    They posted her picture in private adoption forums; they worked their way through phone books; they scoured blogs and public Flickr albums and newspaper articles.
  20. appraise
    consider in a comprehensive way
    “It’s fine. I wanted to come.” He licks sugar off his fingers and appraises me. “You snuck out, too, didn’t you? There’s no way your parents would’ve let you go.”
  21. heady
    extremely exciting as if by alcohol or a narcotic
    That crackling and heady scent of smoke, the way the sparks arced through the night so loud and bright and hot they made your heart race—Harry’s skin against mine feels just like that.
  22. wizened
    lean and wrinkled by shrinkage as from age or illness
    Here the trees are tall and huge and old and leafless, their branches wizened and sort of gothic-looking.
  23. emphatically
    in a forceful manner; with emphasis
    Then there are seven new messages—I listen to each one, my mom crying by the last three—and that emphatically answers my question: it’s worse that they did.
  24. scrutinize
    look at critically or searchingly, or in minute detail
    A white woman in a pickup truck at the pump behind us scrutinizes us, leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, and I feel that old mixture—maybe it’s not justified, but a lot of times it probably is—of defiance and pity and shame.
  25. buffer
    protect from impact
    I’d draw the way the light keeps glancing off the rearview mirror and the way the world outside the window looks like a painting and the way inside the car we feel kind of buffered from it all, how really everything that matters is right here inside.
  26. facade
    the front of a building
    We drive through town—it takes all of sixty seconds, old buildings with flat facades that remind me of the Gold Rush and squarish brick buildings mashed against the kind of newer building that masquerades as older, hastily built—and keep going out past town on a dirt road into the grasslands.
  27. herald
    foreshadow or presage
    Then a Jeep pulls up from over the hill, heralded by dust, and I think even if there were other cars here, even if we weren’t out in the far reaches of the state this way, I’d know it was her.
  28. imperceptibly
    in a manner that is difficult to discern
    Her expression shifts almost imperceptibly, fast enough that I only see the quick cover-up and not whatever’s lying underneath.
  29. intrinsically
    with respect to its inherent nature
    Because this is what I always hoped for my life when I thought my sister had died: that somehow by being the one who was still here I’d figure things out. That it does mean something to be there, that the world is intrinsically different by you being in it, and that whatever ways it spins around you, you can take something from that and make it better, somehow, than it was.
  30. resolutely
    showing firm determination or purpose
    When we go back in our food has come, and Joy sits down, almost mechanically, and resolutely picks up her fork.
  31. exhume
    dig up for reburial or for medical investigation
    And that was why my mom hated the experiment so much. Because it exhumed everything she’d tried so hard to bury.
  32. limbo
    the state of being disregarded or forgotten
    But comparing how I feel right now to how I did just hours ago—I should’ve just let myself stay in limbo forever.
  33. intimate
    thoroughly acquainted through study or experience
    I should’ve recognized sooner how intimately they understand guilt and how it’s shaped them and shaped me, too, both the choices they’ve had to make and the stories they tell themselves.
  34. gratuitous
    without cause
    It’s hard to remember there was ever a time when they weren’t publicly and permanently linked, that it would’ve taken any kind of observation to see what there was between them, but I had known: she kept bringing him up gratuitously, finding ways to work him into conversation.
  35. mote
    a tiny piece of anything
    The sunlight splits through the dark curtains, illuminating all the dust motes suspended in the air.
  36. intoxicating
    extremely exciting
    When you don’t live out the life you were born into, the idea that you might someday, somehow, understand is intoxicating.
  37. fraught
    marked by distress
    You think of it the nights your boyfriend comes to visit, the day your family drives up to surprise you, the day your sister calls from college in tears, homesick, and you settle back into those easy rhythms and unspoken sentences of siblinghood, the least fraught language you know and what now feels like your mother tongue.
  38. roiling
    (of a liquid) agitated vigorously; in a state of turbulence
    Or maybe it’s just that the other things roiling underneath are unmasked now, and those things are harder things to feel.
  39. gangrene
    the localized death of living cells
    When the wheels touch down you feel the land returning to you, spreading like gangrene from that initial thud, and you have to take a Xanax.
  40. mantra
    a commonly repeated word or phrase
    You stay close to the door and recite the mantra your sister made you repeat (I am doing this for myself I owe them nothing, I can always leave).
Created on Thu Jan 23 16:11:31 EST 2020 (updated Fri Jan 24 11:54:05 EST 2020)

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