People behaved mostly well and then they died.
He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.
I was never really on my side in any argument. I liked the Old Testament spitefulness of the phrase got what she deserved.
Libby must have marinated in anxious stomach acid for nine months, soaking up all that worry.
He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse.
Well, a little girl is more likely to trust a person who reminds her of her momma, right?” Depends on what her momma’s like, I thought.
My mother said she was the most popular girl in school, and I believed it. Jackie said she was the meanest, and I believed that, too.
People are strange.
They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish – expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.
You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?
Never leave a message for someone you really want to reach. No, you keep phoning and phoning until someone picks up – out of anger or curiosity or fear – and then you blurt out whatever words will keep them on the line. I.
It was a town that bred complacency through cable TV and a convenience store.
So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for his daughter’s return: a killer smile.
She’s a planner. She doesn’t, you know, wing anything. She likes to make lists and check things off, get things done.
People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don’t reach my lips. She looks nice today, I’d think, but somehow it wouldn’t occur to me to say it out loud.
I couldn’t decide if I’d been mistreated. By Richard, by those boys who took my virginity, by anyone. I was never really on my side in any argument.
He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.
I’d always liked our inside jokes the best – they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising.
You have the same rhythm. Click. You just know each other. All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it’s so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It’s finally arrived.
My story for the day was a limp sort of evil.