Nobody in the world can make you crazy like your family can.
If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.
I loved him, you know,′ she said. ‘I would have loved him as hard as he’d let me, for the rest of my life.
All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space.
Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.
I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind’s eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.
We see this a lot, people desperate to keep talking because when they stop we will leave and they will be left alone with what has happened.
This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.
They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
There’s optimistic, and then there’s plain crazy.
Her boarders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she’s opaque, she’s impermeable, she’s a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.
Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail.
It was your basic Irish summer day, irritatingly coy, all sun and skidding clouds and jackknifing breeze, ready at any second to make an effortless leap into bucketing rain or blazing sun or both.
Not just the normal back-and-forth. A prickle in the air, a slicing edge. I couldn’t tell if it was about her, or just the day that was it, or if it was the squad. Murder is different. The beat goes faster and harder; the tightrope is higher and narrower. One foot wrong, and you’re gone.
The shot of cold air hits Becca like it’s been fired straight through the glass from the huge outside, wild and magic, pungent with foxes and juniper.
I never knew and never will whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.
You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie.
The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.
I’ve got good psychopath sensors now. It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized.” She.