My name is Danielle. I’m eighteen. I’ve been stealing things for as long as I can remember.
My mother taught me to believe in silver, to believe in things, but I think it’s more important to believe in me.
This is what happiness is, past the rubbish of its overuse as a word, past the cracked gloss of the letters that mean nothing when strung together. They mean something now, and I know what it’s like when you and someone else are right together. How simple is is, and how amazing.
I thought living dead girls couldn’t feel pain, thought I was emptied out but I’m not, I’m not.
She became a story, one I have mostly forgotten. One I can’t end because she died a long time ago.
I never went for the talkers.
I’d forgotten how much feelings hurt.
I don’t know, shifted a little or something, smoothed down–people would think of me the way they think of Dave, and everything would always be perfect. I would be perfect.
It was like we were all so busy trying to be happy or saying we were happy, but underneath there was nothing but bitterness, the kind that could only be bled out in ink, in unspoken word.
Too late, too late, juice pouring does not a kind soul make, and I killed you.
I’d dressed up and hoped and I was so tired of doing that, so tired of dreaming and being unable to stop it despite the fact that I’d seen, maybe better than anyone here, what dreams could do to you.
Imagine a guy. He’s a little taller than you, with perfect skin, skin that just screams “touch me!” and dark hair and gorgeous blue eyes and he looks so sweet and he is sweet. And then have him blush a little.
Then I heard someone laugh. I wished I didn’t know whose laugh it was, but I knew Will’s laugh just like I knew he had a small scar right above his left elbow. You couldn’t be reluctantly lust-ridden for someone without noticing stuff about them.
I think you’re the saddest person I’ve ever met. It’s like you’re drowning in it.
He looks trapped, helpless and furious, and that’s a feeling I know too well. Know how much it hurts. Know how it holds you down, how every day there are a thousand little ways to see there is nothing you can do to change who or what you are.
Anger can try to break your heart, but sorrow is what will. What can. What does.
Sometimes being me is very confusing.
My full name is Lauren Lee Smith. Of all the names I could have been given, that’s the one I got. Lauren Lee Smith. It has all the personality of a toaster.
Talking about someone who makes you happy actually makes you happy. Being happy makes you want to talk, to go over everything, to share it so you can remember it all over again.
I’m broken, I have cut myself wide open. I can see my heart and it is not what I believed it was, it is not good and kind and all the things I have always thought I am.
And now I see what has been there all along, what I’ve noticed but never truly understood until now. Eli is as uncertain as I am, as we all are. Life has surprised him like it has me. Has hurt him like it has me.