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Last year, her friend Amanda Hart said something about her mom slapping her and it bothered Eliza so much she told her mom. Then, to Eliza’s horror, her mom called CPS. Amanda got put in foster care and moved upstate. Eliza never saw her again, but Amanda called her once in tears to tell Eliza she ruined her life.
Wow that's a harsh new reality for her poor friend, but Eliza's mom is most likely a mandated reporter considering her job. So she did what she had to.
“Eliza, I am a mandated reporter,”
Like I assumed haha
On Olivia’s first day at Riverwood High, she spotted Eliza across the noisy English classroom first period before the bell rang and thought, I pick her. That’s my new best friend.
Put's a whole new meaning to a "Pick Me" girl
You know how in true crime shows, the cliché description of every dead girl is that she “lit up a room”? Well, Eliza was the opposite. She darkened the room like a black light.
Olivia can read people like it’s nobody’s business. She loves the challenge of getting what she wants out of them. Sometimes it really feels like the world is Olivia’s puppet show.
Olivia’s not going to let her friend go that easily.
That truck where fights happened. The time he grabbed her hair so hard and then—she doesn’t want to think about it. Ever, ever, ever.
From the outside, she would maybe look like a girl daydreaming about movie stars or crushes. But no. Olivia is dreaming of murder.
Sometimes ugly thoughts just get stuck in his head like a catchy song. Last summer it started at the butcher shop. It started with the thought of what it would feel like to fuck a piece of meat. He couldn’t shake it until he went through with it.
Wowww that's more disturbing than the American Pie scene. Cuz initially I had assumed he was diddling himself while staring at the animal carcasses, but this is somehow worst.
This is life now since he recently decided he’s a psychopath. He’s still getting used to it. It’s a series of going through the motions. Feelings are performative.
To be fair, his mom is such a superfan of the DSM-V that she’d diagnose a block of cheese with depression and prescribe it Zoloft if she could.
Lmao
Even as an admitted psychopath, he’s never planned on murdering his parents. Far more extreme than fantasizing about bashing in your best friend’s skull.
LOL at least he has some standards I guess.
This thing happened when I was thirteen. He made me—he—I don’t want to get into it. But it was really bad. After that happened, he started going to church and being like obsessed with church. Like pathological.”
“What happened?” Ezra asks, confused. She gives him a long blank look, one so far away it’s like a lobotomized patient. “Something that I’ll never let myself think about again.”
I'm starting to think I know what happens
I think you and I are the same.” “You think we’re both psychopaths?” “I don’t know if that’s what I’d say, exactly, but I do think we could kill someone and move on with our lives and not let it bother us.”
if you’re really a psychopath—you could kill and feel nothing. Or if you’re anything like those bad boys in those books you like to read, maybe you could kill and enjoy it.”
Shame’s a lie. Shame would never exist if it weren’t for other people.
Maybe he likes the crap they give each other. Maybe they’ve been flirting all along.
He’s incredibly turned on. It isn’t just something happening in his pants. His entire being is turned on.
Haha Interesting but fitting way to put this but
Funny how it takes patience in life to build anything worth having but only a minute to destroy it.
Maybe Olivia West is what he’s needed all along—the person most like him in the world, hidden in plain view.
There’s something still spinning inside him even as he sits still. A longing. Olivia stirs something in him. Is it creepy, how he touched her shoulder back there?
After you just mentioned she stirs longings in you? Yea just a smidge.
she didn’t come back into his life—until he was twenty-two and assigned a blotter story about an assault and battery. The perpetrator’s name? Angela Atkins.
Wait. Ezra? Did Olivia just ask him to say hi to Ezra and not Eliza? He must have heard her wrong.
Haha I wondered if he'd catch that.
“Tell them you’re running late. I won’t take long.”
LOL Is that really something to brag about?
“Did I do something to offend you?” he asks.
Yea, you forgot the damn trash apparently LMAO
When every damn thing in her life feels like an obligation, pleasure becomes one, too.
She isn’t sure what’s worse: the sound of her parents having sex, or the sound of her parents arguing about not having sex. Either way, pass the barf bag.
Dr. Hunter is a psychiatrist, idiot! That’s what psychiatrists do, they give your disorder a name and kill it with pills.
Ezra’s been laughing in his room and blabbing on and on to someone for almost an hour at this point. He’s usually sullen and quiet in there while he blows people’s heads off in his imaginary world. But today the rise and fall of his baritone is distracting. He also sounds weirdly playful. To repeat: her brother. Playful.
Yea cuz someone's got a new twisted gf
“He’s on the phone with someone,” Eliza says, standing up. “Yeah, it sounds like he’s talking to a girl,” her mom says as she squints at the page. “A girl?” say Eliza and her dad in unison. Someone might as well have said he’s talking to Bigfoot.
Potential. People always say that word with a promising flourish, but Eliza’s old enough and wise enough to know it’s just an insult in disguise.
It just means it's a good start, but could be better.
“So who were you talking to?” Eliza asks. “No one,” Ezra answers, laying his napkin in his lap. Eliza and her parents collectively stare at Ezra, waiting for his lie to turn into the truth as they chew their meal. “So you’re in there laughing and talking to yourself?” Carson asks. Ezra puts an insane amount of pepper on his meat. Eliza wants to sneeze just looking at it. “You are all incredibly nosy,”
LOL Why was this such a sitcom moment?
He’s the co-star of her childhood. She really doesn’t want to see him get hurt. And she has a gut feeling that Olivia’s going to hurt him.
Aw I love that phrase for a sibling dynamic , they're the co-star of your childhood.
Olivia is truly smitten with Ezra. She’s not faking it. She’s always had a thing for him. And that night was pure magic. She’s never been able to just show someone the monster she is underneath her girl costume.
Olivia got the most delicious shivers all over her when she realized that Ezra is just like her. He, too, has an inner monster he keeps hidden from the world.
As her father grabbed her hair and pulled her inside the house, as he dragged her kicking and screaming into his dark room and talked to her like she was a woman and not a girl, a whore and not his daughter,
then she just went into a place inside herself that was quiet and deep enough that no one could hurt her, not even the man who was pinning her to his bed with his hand to her throat.
Omg even though I suspected something of this nature... it's still horrific to imagine he'd actually rape and assault his own daughter!!
That rule is that Olivia’s room is her sanctuary. No matter what city or state they live in, trailer, apartment, or cheap house, her room is hers.
It’s a shame that she has to do this, but sometimes the price of freedom is murder.
You know how some people do halfhearted suicide attempts as a cry for help? A shallow wrist cut or a dozen aspirin? This almost feels like the homicidal equivalent of that.
He’s in a trailer where he’s never been before hugging a deranged girl he’s falling for who’s asking him to commit half a murder. That’s what she’s asking him to do, isn’t it? She started it and he’d finish it.
“Daddy.” She begins to cry. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Hold me, Ez.” She turns into him and he wraps her in his arms, feeling nothing, so numb, a boy made of ice.
This girl in front of him—this exquisite, twisted soul with blood in her hair. They’re now bonded in a way that Ezra is certain he’ll never be bonded to anyone else as long as he lives. It’s more serious than a marriage or a child. It’s murder.
in a terrifying flash, he isn’t sure how the fuck he’s going to live with himself.
The river is the blood running through their own veins and the forests are their bones and the landmarks are scars that each come with stories.
