I don’t answer. I just kiss him.
My mother was good at that, making people feel normal. Safe. Like as long as she was there, nothing truly bad could happen.
I’ve got my Motown girl-group music playing, and my supplies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I’ve cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrapbook has texture. It’s thick and chunky and doesn’t close all the way.
I wished for Conrad on every birthday, every shooting star, every lost eyelash, every penny in a fountain was dedicated to the one I loved.
But I don’t think people change at the core. They are who they are.
Love. He said “love.” I feel dizzy. I am a girl who is loved, by a boy, and not just her sisters and father and dog.
To have it all, you have to risk it all.
Leave with the one you came with, unless he’s a drunk – then find your own way home.
Kitty used to hoard raisins; she was probably the most regular kid in kindergarten.
I’d nursed a crush on Conrad for whole school years. I could survive for months, years, on a crush. It was like food. It could sustain me. If Conrad was mine, there was no way I’d break up with him over a summer-or a school year, for that matter.
Whoever you should choose to partake in that enjoyment, that is your choice, and choose wisely.
My voice was high and desperate, and I was crying, and I hated that I was crying, but I couldn’t help it. I had to keep talking, because this was it. Last chance.
Song girls have an unspoken pact: to make life as easy as possible for Daddy.
I think that if I just delete him enough it will be like none of it ever happened, and my heart won’t hurt so badly.
If someone is giving you a compliment, I don’t think they should have to tell you they’re giving you one; it should probably be obvious to the person receiving it.
It doesn’t matter that they’re broken up. He was hers first, which means he’s hers always.
I move to slug him in the shoulder, and he laughs and grab my hand and links my finger with his. It feels like my heart is beating right through my hand. It’s the first time we’ve hold hands for real, and it feels different from those fake times. like electric currents, in a good way. The best way.
Wistfully, she says, “I wish I’d been in love more than once. I think you should fall in love at least twice in high school.” Then she lets out a little sigh and falls asleep. Margot falls asleep like that – – one dream sigh and she’s off to never-never land, just like that.
All right, then we’ll wait. Whatever my girl wants.
This is what Margot was talking about, this double standard. Boys will be boys, but girls are supposed to be careful: of our bodies, of our futures, of all the ways people judge us.