It’s ironic, isn’t it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn’t done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and.
Music, or a voice; just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all.
When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing.
I didn’t know you even could get arrested in Amsterdam.
These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirement for them.
It wasn’t a remarkable face in any way, but it had a clean-lined sweetness that brought up summer barbecues, golden retrievers, soccer games on new-mown grass, and I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
You know something?” Frank said, after a moment. “You’ve got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.
They’ve had it spelled out a dozen times, in cringey classes, in cringey parent talks: when to tell an adult. The idea never comes near any of their minds. This thing opening in front of them is nothing to do with those careful speeches. This mix of roaring rage and a shame that stains every cell, this crawling understanding that now their bodies belong to other people’s eyes and hands, not to them: this is something new.
Daniel glanced up from his book. “No pasts,” he said. The fall of it, the finality, told me it was something he had said before.
Frank has a childhood memory of Ma “screeching at Jackie for being such a bold girl that her da had to go to the pub because he couldn’t stand to be around her.
It looked vaguely, frustratingly familiar, but I couldn’t tell whether this was because I actually remembered it or because I knew I should.
This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
That girl in the photo isn’t one solid person, feet set solidly in one irrevocable life; that girl is an illusive firework-burst made of light reflecting off a million different possibilities.
I had – simply by surviving – become a freak of nature.
Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl. At.
I think you’ve got something there,” said Daniel. “Not jealousy, after all: fear. It’s a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history – even a hundred years ago, even fifty – it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment. What a strange reversal.
The overhead light streaked.
I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia.
Either the color on the TV set was off or he had used too much fake tan; his face was orange, the whites of his eyes spookily bright.
Selena feels the hidden things thinning away to black veils you could pop with a fingertip, puddling into harmless sleep on the ground.