And I am suddenly five years old again, standing in our laundry room in Portland, listening to the throaty.
I think about what I’ll do to survive all the millions and millions of days that will be exactly like this one, two-face-to-face mirrors multiplying a reflection into infinity.
I’ve found the thread of anger again. Now I’m following it, pulling myself forward on it, hand over hand.
The darkness seems to come alive on all sides of us, full of darting shadows and malicious, looming shapes.
I feel another stab of jealousy, watching Alex watching her.
Lindsay said I was going to be the kind of old woman who memorizes phone books and keeps flattened cereal boxes and newspapers piled from floor to ceiling in her house, looking for messages from space in the bar codes.
I don’t think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him. He is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more lights than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.
People thought she and Pippa and Thomas and Sam were the freaks. But the real freaks were people like Evans – people who could hide their true selves completely, as if all their lives they were wearing Halloween masks.
Plato believed that the whole world – everything we can see – was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can’t actually see the real thing, the thing that’s casting the shadow in the first place.
I’ve been horrible to him for days now. This is the problem: Take away the cure, and the primers, and the codes, and you are left with no rules to follow. Love comes only in flashes.
That’s what Hana doesn’t understand, has never understood. For some of us, it’s about more than the deliria. Some of us, the lucky ones, will get the chance to be reborn: newer, fresher, better. Healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor sharp.
What are you doing?’ I whirl around to face him – again, surprised by how confident I sound, considering that my heart is rushing, tumbling. Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys – maybe you just have to be angry all the time.
She shrugs again. “You were unconscious when they brought you home,” she says matter-of-factly, as though this is a natural fact of life, or something I did – and not because a bunch of regulators clubbed me on the back of the head. That’s the irony of it. She’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one, the dangerous one. Meanwhile, the guy downstairs who nearly fractured my skull and bled my brains all over the pavement is the savior.
I let out a huge snort of laughter right in the middle of AP american history. Everyone whips around and stares at me but I don’t care. This must be what it’s like to do drugs.
She spelled the word ineffable in her head, just once.
You want me to be real with you? Okay, I’ll be real with you. I like the way that you bite your lip. I like the way that you walk around. Like the world is a crowded elevatornad your body is just some lugguage you’re trying to shrink up so it doesn’t bother anybody. I like your body. I like to think about touching it. I like to think about how long it will take me to walk my fingers across every single inch of it without missing a signle spot. Is that real enough for you?
This, for us, is heaven.
Goddamnmotherfuckingsonsofbitchesgetthehelloffmyyardyoupiecesofshit.
Words are snares to trip you and ropes to hang you on and whirling storms to confuse you and lead you the wrong way.
And this, really, is the story-within-the-story, because of you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light.
The only good thing about being kind of shy is that nobody bugs you when you want to be left alone.