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“When you’re making something out of nothing, bad press is good press. But when you’ve already established a reputation, bad press can kill you.” He points at me. “You have nothing right now. Bad press is what you need. Use it. Don’t be stupid.”
when I look at her, all I see is a girl trapped in her own world. Hell, she’s trapped in her own fucking body. She just needs time, but no one seems to be giving it to her.
I’ve tried so hard not to be that guy—the one that terrorizes other people. The one that no one else but Lily
can possibly understand. It’s hard to walk away from this instinct. It’s self-preservation. If I don’t attack first, I’m going to be slaughtered by gut-wrenching pain.
People make mistakes every day, some small and some big, but I just wonder when I’ll stop making them. Or is this a lifelong thing? Do we all just wander through life, fucking up and trying to put ourselves back together only to continue on again?
Are we the accumulation of our mistakes? A part of me regrettably thinks so. My failures have defined me more than my triumphs.
But I don’t want to live in that hopeless reality. Not anymore. I want to be the accumulation of my failures, my successes, of all the people I’ve ever met, of the man I love, and the life I want. I want to be defined by so many factors ...
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Not good or bad. Just complex.
“The things we bury,” I say under my breath, “have a way of coming back to haunt us.”
Maybe one day he’ll realize how far we’re all willing to go. For the people we love most.
I attack Scott, I feel like shit. I do nothing, I feel like shit. What the fuck is left for me?
The worst part about being the underdog: I never win until the last minute. So I dig and claw and scrape, struggling in hope that in the final act, I’ll rise above. But what happens if I never do?
“I forgive you,” she says easily. “How?” She’s not soft. She sits up straight with barriers hundreds of feet tall. “Because I know you’ll never forgive yourself,” she says. “Your guilt is punishment enough, don’t you think?”
Want to know the most deplorable, heartless thing in my head? I am so fucking relieved that wasn’t Lily on the news. Extending empathy for my best friend, Connor, or for Lily’s sister—I can’t do it. Deep down, I just think: finally it’s not us, finally the world has shit on someone else. It’s a thought that turns my blood cold, my forearms on my knees, sitting on the couch and waiting for the guilt to come crush me.
When you have money like we do, there will always be people ready to bury you for a payout. It’s how the world turns.
he hasn’t calculated the fact that negative cannon-blasts from tabloids can easily knock down their defenses.
“You have to realize that I’m just doing my job. If I didn’t write those stories, somebody else would have, and I wouldn’t be paid nearly enough to afford rent in New York City. We don’t all come from money.” Right. I don’t know if it’s my civic duty to let people berate me on the internet so they can afford their apartment. Maybe it is. Maybe this is the cost of growing up in luxury.
While my girlfriend sinks under the weight of the world’s hypocrisy, she bears this immeasurable guilt that no one understands.
Deep down, she wishes that Rose had the same outcome as her, so at least she could feel less singled out, less repulsed by herself, less like a spot on the world that should have been wiped clean. And she can’t destroy those feelings or try to explain them. Because they seem completely fucked up.
But I know what it’s like to have emotions that war within you. To want something so cold and callous, only to feel a shred of se...
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“Revenge isn’t a benefit, Lo. It’s self-gratification, an emotional response with very little logic and even less reward.”
