Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart.
Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.
Eu imaginava essas coisas porque precisava. Precisava achar que tudo o que ela fizera havia sido por amor. Porque eu podia entender isso. Podia perdoar. Fazia-me pensar que talvez um dia eu conseguisse perdoar a mim mesma.
I thought about Finn. How he did whatever he wanted. Just like my mother said. He never let the tunnel squash him. But still, there he was. In the end he was still crushed to death by his own choices. Maybe what Toby said was right. Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.
Preciso descobrir como fazer as coisas sempre voltarem para mim, em vez de sempre irem embora voando.
And maybe that’s what it meant. Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Maybe Finn understood everything, as usual. You may as well tell them where you live, because they’ll find you anyway. They always do.
I didn’t just feel like I was from the suburbs but like I was from someplace a world away from here. Like I didn’t belong but also like I didn’t want to. Like I didn’t care. And in lots of ways that felt just as good as blending in. Maybe even better. It.
If teachers pretended that everything they said was off topic, we’d have a whole school full of straight-A students.
That all the jealousy and envy and shame we carried was our own kind of sickness. As much a disease as Toby and Finn’s AIDS.
All I had was a strange man in the city, and secret trips to Playland, and pleas for help from the dead.
Everyone needs to think they have secrets.
If I could time-travel, could I be selfless enough to stop Finn from getting AIDS? Even if it meant I would never have him as my friend? I didn’t know. I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.
What if she tried to do something to herself? I didn’t want to care, but somehow, like always, I did. She was wired into my heart. Twisted and kinked and threaded right through.
That’s my place. That’s where I stop. In the book A Wrinkle in Time, it says that time is like a big old rumpled blanket. What I’d like is to be caught in one of those wrinkles. Tucked away. Hidden in a small tight fold.
Finn didn’t even seem to care that he was dying,” I said. And it was true. Finn was as calm as ever right up to the very last time I saw him. “Don’t you know? That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.
Above the tiny fire hung the real portrait. The painted Greta and me watching the real Greta and me watching another copy of ourselves burn away.
Sometimes I tell myself that it wasn’t so bad. Being responsible for killing someone who was dying anyway. Murdering a person who was already almost dead. That’s what I try to think sometimes, but it never works. Two months is sixty days, 1,440 hours, 86,400 minutes. I was a stealer of minutes. I stole them from Toby and I stole them from myself. That’s what it came down to. My family would go on forever thinking Toby was a murderer, but they’d never know about me.
Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.
Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling immensely sad that somebody would throw their whole life away just to make sure other people were happy.
I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size.
Being the sick person seemed better than being the nurse. Lying there, having people get every little thing you might need. Who wouldn’t want that? But then I thought better. The sick person would always be the sick person, but the nurse, she would have to be the nurse for only a little while.