The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

“What? But I don’t even know you.” “Exactly,” she says, heading for the bedroom to collect her clothes. “But I want to know you,”

THIS IS ALREADY HURTING ME

“Don’t forget me in the meantime.” An old habit. A superstition. A plea. Toby shakes his head. “How could I?” She smiles, as if it’s just a joke. But Addie knows, as she forces herself down the stairs, that it’s already happening—knows that by the time he closes the door, she’ll be gone.

ALREADY? Absolutely not

And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop. Instead, she watches the cart round the bend, and vanish between trees, with one hand clenched around her father’s ring.

Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.

All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it,

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

Adeline had wanted to be a tree. To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.

Adeline is three and twenty, already too old to wed. Three and twenty, a third of a life already buried.

THIS STRESSES ME OUT.

Her mother said it was duty. Her father said it was mercy, though Adeline doesn’t know for whom. Estele said nothing, because she knew it wasn’t fair. Knew this was the risk of being a woman, of giving yourself to a place, instead of a person. Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax. They have given her away.

Time—how often has she heard it described as sand within a glass, steady, constant. But that is a lie, because she can feel it quicken, crashing toward her.

Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.

This cannot be her life. This cannot be all there is.

I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.

It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one,

Perhaps because, for an instant, it seems a blessing, this undoing of an accident, a righting of a wrong, and not simply an extension of her own erasure. The inability to leave a mark.

It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.

It is easier to be alone among so many people.

Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry’s never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he’s tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can’t find the words, the story, the voice. Can’t figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves. Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.

She is looking at him with such open want he should feel wanted, should feel something besides sad, lonely, lost.

Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months.

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?

If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

“How sad, that you had only dreams.”

In the glass, she sees herself—her old self, the one she might have been, Roger’s children at her side and a new baby on her hip and her familiar face gone sallow with fatigue. Addie sees herself beside him in the bed, the space cold between their bodies, sees herself bent over the hearth the way her mother always was, the same frown lines, too, fingers aching too much to stitch the tears in clothes, far too much to hold her old drawing pencils; sees herself wither on the vine of life, and walk the short steps so familiar to every person in Villon, the narrow road from cradle to grave—the little church waiting, still and gray as a tombstone.

“If you could have one thing,” cuts in Henry, “what would it be?” He studies her, squinting at her as if she’s a book, not a person; something to be read. She stares back at him like he’s a ghost. A miracle. An impossible thing. This, she thinks, but she lifts her empty glass and says, “Another beer.”

“Life is so brief, and every night in Rennes I’d go to bed, and lie awake, and think, there is another day behind me, and who knows how few ahead.”

“I don’t mean in that normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like it’s surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”

“an homage to the exhaustions of serial monogamy and a testament to the dangers of unbalanced affection.”

Time moves so fucking fast. Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things,

Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing.

There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

I’m sorry.

This whole chapter hurt

“I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and I’m just tired…” His voice breaks. “I’m tired of falling short. Tired of being … it’s not that I’m alone. I don’t mind alone. But this—” His fingers knot in his shirtfront. “It hurts.”

“But I don’t want to be in pain,” says Henry hoarsely. “I want—” “You want to be loved.”

OH MY GOSH POOR HENRY

the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves.

There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions.

Because time doesn’t work like photos. Click, and it stays still. Blink, and it leaps forward.

His mother comes out of the kitchen, tugging off a pair of oven mitts. She cups his face, and smiles, and tells him she’s so happy he’s there. Henry believes her.

THE CONTEXT BEHIND THIS MAKES ME EVEN MORE SAD

He knows it’s not real, not in the strictest sense, but he doesn’t care. It still feels good.

FUCK. ALL HENRY WANTS IS TO BE LOVED. AINT THAT THE FUCKING TRUTH. MY HEART HURTS

“It can’t just be about the other person. You have to be someone, too. You have to know who you are. Back then, you didn’t.”

When Henry is with her, time speeds up, and it doesn’t scare him. When he is with Addie, he feels alive, and it doesn’t hurt.

he never felt at home at home,

Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?

You are more than enough, because you are not real.

And then she dips his finger in the paint, and brings it to the pane of glass, and this time, she writes in halting cursive, one letter at a time. Her name. It sits, nested among the many drawings. Addie LaRue

My heart

A life reduced to a block of stone, a patch of grass.

“You would rather the burning streets of Paris?” “I assumed you would be fond of war.” “That isn’t war,” he says curtly. “It’s only a skirmish.”

Chilling

Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”

She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text.