The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

(She has seen lions now. They came to Paris in the spring as part of an exhibit. They were nothing like the beasts of her imagination. So much grander, and so much less, their majesty diminished by the dimensions of their cells. Addie went a dozen times to see them, studied their mournful gazes, looking past the visitors to the gap in the tent, the single sliver of freedom.)

Every moment pressed into her own memory, while she herself slips from the minds of others with the slightest push, erased by a closing door, an instant out of sight, a moment of sleep. Unable to leave a mark on anyone, or anything.

So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.

She can speak German, Italian, Spanish, but French is different, French is bread baking in her mother’s oven, French is her father’s hands carving wood, French is Estele murmuring to her garden. French is coming home.

You hate olives and people who talk during movies.

Addie makes herself small promises in the space between his visits. She will not linger in his arms. She will not fall asleep beside him. She will not feel anything but his lips on her skin, his hands tangled in hers, the weight of him against her. Small promises, but ones she does not keep. It is only sex. And then it is not.

“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”

The only thing he can make out are the seven freckles, and those are so faint he can’t tell if they’re really visible, or his memory is simply filling them in where they should be.