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325 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2012
Here's the thing: I don't choose to take things. I have to. I've always had to do certain things, since the day I turned seven and began to insist that I wanted to stay six. I didn't know why, but seven felt off, somehow, made me feel like the world was tilting too much to one side. It wasn't so bad at first. Just little things—like the way the food looked on my plate, or needing to eat peas before chicken, or needing to put the left shoe on before the right. I started taking little things—a toothbrush or a candy bar from a store, discarded ticket stubs from the movie theater, stickers from the kids at school.
But since Oren disappeared, it has gotten worse. A lot worse. Now, when the urge comes on, it's like this superhuman force that grips my body and won't let go until I have the thing I've spotted, the thing I need. And it's not the taking or the stealing I crave, it's the having and the keeping. Forever. With me. Safe.
"after school, i've been picking bus lines at random, finding new places to explore. mostly i go to other parts of the suburbs, find the high school or the baseball hat store at the mall or a restaurant my brother might have liked"
random quote
"i barely know anything about him, but he seems so familiar --as though i could flip through childhood photo albums and he'd be in every picture."
"a warmth fills me, like it used to on saturday mornings when i was a kid and i'd wake before anyone else to watch cartoons, wrapped in my fuzzy pale blue blanket, waiting for everyone else to wake up, too"
random quote
"a rush fills my whole body as i do, clears up my head, makes me feel instantly like everything in the whole world is okay, like the universe and solar system and every big, holy planet and blade of grass and flake of fresh-fallen snow are rotating and growing and falling just for me right now. when i find where it belongs, where it fits, everything will be whole: i will plug up the emptiness, the swirling, sucking drain of the universe spinning into chaos."
"Simple yet different but haunting"