Sorry is one of the worst words of all: it hardly ever means what you want it to” -Mia.
In approved places, every story serves a purpose. But forbidden books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them – the best ones – are doors.
She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.
Certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.
The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.
I haven’t been falling all this time. I’ve been flying.
We no longer pay attention to the clocks. Why should we? Noon is the taste of sawdust, and the feel of a splinter under a nail. Morning is mud and crumbling caulk. Evening is the smell of cooked tomatoes and mildew. And night is shivering, and the feel of mice sniffing around our skin.
I hope she’s alive. Even more, I believe.
I could feel the heat from all the colored lights pressing down on me like a hand, and the music seemed to echo somewhere behind my ribs, making my heart flutter and skip in time.
Izzy blows air out between her lips. “I wish nobody ever died,” she says.
I don’t know which is worse: that I’m home and so much is different, or that I’m home and so much feels the same.
He hated mosquitoes. Spiders too, although he liked outer insects, found them fascinating. Like humans, in a way- stupid and sometimes vicious, blinded by need.
Everyone has the pushed and prodded and tugged look that rich people have, like they’re just giant pieces of taffy, ready to be molded.
I got the thrill of being alive, being on a stupid speck of a planet in the middle of an infinity of nothing, but still alive.
But I am going to keep going. I am going to soar, and soar, and break away – up, up, up into the thundering noise and the wind, like a bird being sucked into the sky.
In books, secret worlds are accessible by doors or keys or other physical objects. But Lovelorn was not such a world, and appeared at whim and only when it felt like it, with a subtle change like the slow shifting of afternoon to evening.
Before we were the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane – before everyone from Connecticut to California knew us by that tagline, and blogs ran pictures of our faces, and searching our names led to sites that crashed from all the traffic – we were just girls, and there were only two of us.
I was the one who was really buried that day.
Eyes the color of a dawn sky, a crown of blond hair, so bright and white and blinding I could swear it was a halo.