As we get older, it’s important for us to help hand back some of what we’ve gained as we’ve grown older. It should be one of your responsibilities – it’s almost like being a mentor.
I wanted to tell her how much I liked her, how I felt this tugging feeling in my stomach that drew me close to her, but I couldn’t let the words out of my mouth because it felt like unleashing something I couldn’t control.
I forgot what it was like to be kissed by someone who might want more than a kiss. I knew then that Ruby was definitely not experimenting. I should have been scared. I should have left the room. I should never have gone upstairs with a girl who made me wobble.
If you accept that there’s a problem, then you have to do something about it.
Nothing good starts with I hope you’ll be happy for me. The phrase is loaded with the unsaid ending because you won’t be happy for yourself.
This is what you get for being a Good Samaritan. You die in a girls’ locker room at the hands of a deranged overachiever.
She flipped her hair over to the opposite side. My stomach flipped over to its opposite side.
Look,” I said in my softest voice. “you got your heart pulped. You missed someone and then you wanted to feel like they loved you again. that’s not pathetic. It’s your heart, it’s soft and mushy and it’s supposed to be and I’m sorry he thought it was okay to mess with it but that’s his mistake, not yours.
Maybe that’s what a relationship means, carrying a part of someone around for the rest of your life.
Cos I fancy you. I’m hoping that if I go to all this effort you’ll look at me and think, ‘Well, she might be a dumbass, but she tries’. And then, I dunno, maybe you’ll flash me or something.
Love didn’t just disappear did it? Mine didn’t. It wasn’t some light I could switch on and off. It was something that had grown inside me, its roots tangled around all the organs of my body.
Relationships change and the past isn’t some static thing you could keep forever like a photograph. No one else seems to understand that. Just because something happened, it doesn’t mean it will mean the same thing to you forever. It changes with you.
The thought made me feel a gasping, grabbing tightness in my chest. Like someone was holding a pillow over my mouth, only the teeny-tiniest molecules of air getting through, more of a taunt than a lifeline. I squeezed my eyes tight shut and forced that part of my mind to turn black. It wasn’t there. There was no problem.
The roller coaster here gives off the distinct aura of taking your life into your own hands, but I hear life-threatening circumstances bring people together, so why not?
I’d never met someone I hated more. Would it have been wrong to burn her house down to get out?
I decided I wouldn’t call her annoying anymore. I didn’t know what it was like to be Meabh, and I certainly would never get what it was like to be Kavi, but I knew what it was like to feel alone.
Was it possible to have your cake and then not be sad when your cake leaves you and smashes your heart into a mushy pulp?
I’m just. A girl. Standing in front. Of another girl, asking her. To please accept. This grand. Gesture. As an apology for being an absolute gobshite.
I thought about how amazing it was that this moment would exist forever. Perfect and unchanged. A moment where I always be madly in love with Ruby Quinn.
I dug deep down into my empathy store and found a dried-up old raisin.
I heard a plea for absolution in those words. I saw it on his face. Tell me I’m not a terrible person.