She stared at Peter, and she ...

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn\'t been thinking, she knew exactly what he\'d felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.
She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

Quotes from the same author

My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.
The best place to cry is on a mother's arms.
I think this is every mother's worst nightmare - something dreadful happening to her child.
That's the strange thing about being a mother: until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one
Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was... ...Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up. I sat between my mother and my father, watching strangers on TV carry in Shaker rockers and dusty paintings and ancient beer tankards and cranberry glass dishes; people and their hidden treasures, who had to be told by experts that they'd taken something incredibly precious for granted.