The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.

It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.

But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. Already seen. Already known. Already lived.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

He’s tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he’s managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind. But then a night would go long, and a day would start late, and now he feels like there’s no time at all. Like he is always late for something.

But it feels too much like a punctuation mark, and she isn’t ready for the night to end, so she kisses him back, deeper, turns the period into a question, into an answer.

“The worst part of every meal is when it ends.”

You think it’s a crime to turn ahead to the end of a book.

“Books feed hungry minds. Tips feed the cat?”

And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open. It is drifting off to sleep.

That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.

“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”