He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him.
Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.
I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.
Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In.
I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.
I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.
She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car.
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.
She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.
She shouldn’t be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.
Well, the universe had spoken. There was no one left to turn to.
Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.
I saw that miracles were shocking, as overwhelming as disasters.
Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?
He could sense the ridiculousness of life even as it tore the guts out of him. She saw that now. And death lay coiled in the dark between the perception and the pain.
Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right.
It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.
Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.
This dumb show of privilege – the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask.