We were reckless with the implications.
Children were only strangers you agreed to live with.
Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable.
The notion made us dizzy, and we lay down on the Larsons’ carpet, which smelled of pet deodorizer and, deeper down, of pet.
As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. “And how you know so much?” Desdemona asked him. To which he replied what many Americans of his generation would have: “It’s science, Ma.
We just want to live. If anyone would let us.
This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The male sperms are faster.” “I bet they’re stupider, too.
Even though he tasted mysterious depths in Bonnie’s mouth, he didn’t search them out because he didn’t want her to stop kissing him.
Psychologists agree that adolescence is much more fraught with pressures and complexities than in years past. Often, in today’s world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.
Acts like these – simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving – held life together.
Behind her freckles, a blush rose to the Object’s face. She was, of course, transfixed by such information. I was speaking into her left ear. The blush spread across her face from that side, as if my words left a visible trace.
Part of coming from old money, apparently, was having old-person habits, those gross, adult needs and desperate palliatives. The Object was still too young for the effects to tell on her. She didn’t have eye bags yet or stained fingernails. But the appetite for sophisticated ruin was already there. She smelled like smoke, if you got close. Her stomach was a mess. But her face continued to give off its autumnal display.
And of course there was the sheer physical fact of her, the blood-tinged blade that she was, the riot of color that caught everyone’s attention.
Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an aiborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted.
It had to do with the way the mail wasn’t delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil’s night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents’ group donated a bench in the girls’ memory to our school.
Who had known they talked so much, held so many opinions, jabbed at the world’s sights with so many fingers? Between our sporadic glimpses of the girls they had been continously living developing in ways we couldn’t imagine, reading every book on the bowdlerized family bookshelf. Somehow, too, they’d kept up dating etiquette, through television or observation at school, so that they knew how to keep the conversation flowing or fill awkward siliences.
A terrible thing happens when you water-ski. After you release the rope, you keep skimming over the water for a while, free. But there comes an inevitable moment when your speed fails to sustain your forward progress. The surface of the water breaks like glass. The depths open up to claim you. That was how I felt on land, watching the Object ski past. That same plunging, hopeless feeling, that emotional physics.
There is basic pain in being sentient, in being witness to the phenomenal existence of the world without any answer as to why.
But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.
It was all new to him: the memorization of strategic speeches, the trial runs of possible conversations, the yogic deep breathing, all leading up the blind, headlong dive into the staticky sea of telephone lines. He had never felt the pain of the lacklust responses, the dread of “Oh... hi”, or the quick annihilation of “Who?