The X had released its first wave of chemical optimism, I could feel it float up inside me like a big test balloon and splatter on the roof of my mouth, spraying good cheer. I could almost taste it, like a fizzy pink jelly.
I drank the rest of the sours and had dark sticky dreams. My mother had cut me open and was unpacking my organs, stacking them in a row on my bed as my flesh flapped to either side. She was sewing her initials into each of them, then tossing them back into me, along with a passel of forgotten objects:.
She had an invisible friend, a giant stuffed bear she called Ben. What kind of kid has an imaginary friend that’s a stuffed animal? She collected hair ribbons and arranged them in alphabetical order by color name. She was the kind of girl who exploited her cuteness with such joy you couldn’t begrudge her.
Tears ran down my mother’s cheeks and dripped loudly onto the leather purse she held in her lap. The woman next to her patted her hand. I slipped my notepad from my jacket pocket and began scribbling notes to one side until my mother slapped her hand on mine and hissed, “You are being disrespectful and embarrassing. Stop or I will make you leave.” I quit writing but kept the pad out, feeling stabbingly defiant. But still blushing.
Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own.
Camille, non hai mai la sensazione che stia per accadere qualcosa di orribile e che tu non possa fare niente per evitarlo? La sensazione di poter solo aspettare?
Sick and sicker and sickest. What was real and what was fake? Was Amma really sick and needing my mother’s medicine, or was the medicine what was making Amma sick? Did her blue pill make me vomit, or did it keep me from getting more ill than I’d have been without it?
I don’t know that anything would be any good anywhere, so it’s hard to gauge if this is better or worse, you know what I mean?” “Like: This place is miserable and I want to die, but I can’t think of any place I’d rather be,” I offered. He turned and stared at me, blue eyes mirroring the oval pool. “That’s exactly what I mean.” Get used to it, I thought.
I feel very sad about those girls,” I said, but it sounded artificial, like a beauty contestant pledging world peace. I did feel sad, but articulating it seemed cheap to me.
I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity.
I took a cue from your beloved Mark Twain: “What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.
I think she’s sick, and I think what she has is contagious.
Why bother? It’s impossible to compete with the dead.
But you should never put a fifteen-year-old on a witness stand in a courtroom filled with a bunch of people he knows and expect a lot of tears.
Thank you, Gillian Flynn, for quoting The Sure Thing- “Nick’s the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind if you puke in his car. Nick!
Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.
Richard wanted to take me to all the town’s secret places, the nooks only the locals knew about. Places where people meet to screw or smoke dope, where teens drink, or folks go to sit by themselves and decide where their lives had unraveled. Everyone has a moment where life goes off the rails.
What a pure way to die.
I spent a lot of time before I actually wrote my first book going, “How do you write a book?” The answer is, you just write.
The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you, my mother used to say whenever I resisted her grooming.