It is not glamorous that I can’t drive a car. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers. However, I am not immune to the feeling of being viewed as a mystery, as a Sinclair, as part of a privileged clan of special people, and as part of a magical, important narrative, just because I am part of this clan. My mother is not immune to it, either. This is who we have been brought up to be. Sinclairs. Sinclairs.
He didn’t shut up when people wanted him to, he made them listen – and then he listened in return. He refused to take things lightly, though he was always quick to laugh.
I wanted so much for us: a life free of constriction and prejudice. A life free to love and be loved.
The woman pushed up the arms of her long-sleeved shirt and turned to the digital readout of her treadmill. A scar wound down her right forearm, jagged, like from a knife, not clean like from an operation. There was a story there.
She had done the deed with credible efficiency. With style, even. She had committed murder with an effing kitty-cat statue in a beautiful state park over a massive and scenic ravine. There had not been a single witness. She had left no blood anywhere.
For the college essay, she wrote that in these stories, being orphaned is a precondition for the making of a hero. She also said those comic book heroes aren’t simple heroes, but ’complicated ones who make moral compromises in the same tradition as the orphans in Victorian narratives.
Then he kissed my eyelids. Kind of licked them. And if you’ve never had someone lick your eyelids, you should know that it’s not exactly romantic and it’s even a tiny bit gross, but it feels like the other person really likes you and accepts you somehow.
The jolt of a new purchase makes Mummy feel powerful, if only for a moment.
Yet another technique of the neglected positivist is to impose a new meaning on a word that exists but, through the convolutions of grammar, doesn’t technically mean what you are deciding it means. The neglected positive of incriminate is criminate, which actually, technically means the same thing as incriminate – because the in- isn’t really making a negative in this case – but it is much more amusing if you use it to mean the opposite.
Every curve of his face was familiar, and also, I had never seen him before.
Be decisive; no one likes a waffler”; “Never complain, never explain” –.
So this Estella breaks the boy’s heart?” “Many times over. On purpose. Estella doesn’t know how to do anything else. Breaking hearts is her only power in the world.
Jule had loved Immie Sokoloff as well as she knew how to love anyone. She really had.
Imogen was a New York City child: open-minded in a way Jule had seen only on television, apparently utterly confident in her own desirability as a friend and hostess.
I spun violently into the sky, raging and banging stars from their moorings, swirling and vomiting.
Do you still miss Gran?” I ask him as we head toward New Clairmont. “Because I miss her. We never talk about her.” “A part of me died,” he says. “And it was the best part.” “You think so?” I ask. “That is all there is to say about it,” says Granddad.
Jule believed that the more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle.
For a moment, the two of us were alone on the planet, with all the vastness of the sky and the future and the past spreading out around us.
We were warm and shivering, and young and ancient, and alive.
So just be normal,” he says, “at least for today. Let’s pretend I’m not a mess, let’s pretend you’re not angry. Let’s act like we’re friends and forget what happened.” I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to be friends. I don’t want to forget. I am trying to remember.