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It’s not some gross open-mouth kiss, but more like a hello-I-missed-you-you’re-as-pretty-as-you-were-on-our-first-date kiss.
What about having huge, bumpy thighs means that I need to apologize?
“Maybe ’cause you don’t always have to win a pageant to wear a crown.”
Just ’cause he’s a big guy doesn’t mean I can tell him all of my Fat Girl Secrets.
Y’all hail the queen.
I think maybe it’s the things we don’t want to talk about that are the things people most want to hear.
Just ’cause something’s easy doesn’t make it right.”
“But maybe Lucy wasn’t supposed to be your compass forever. Maybe she was there for you just long enough so you could learn how to be your own compass and find your own way.” She winks at me. “The universe is a strange thing.”
Mitch doesn’t talk to him like he’s some little kid. Because to Mitch, he’s not. To Mitch, everyone’s somebody.
I think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you’re trying to become. Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can.”
“Why have you been sitting next to me these last two days? In class. You can talk to me at work.” He does that thing again where he brushes his knuckles across his chin. “I guess I would rather talk to you everywhere.”
“Because life is not a river and we’re not all headin’ in the same direction.”
“I’ll never understand how it is people navigate their whole lives without knowing their signs. What’s your birthday?”
It’s that I’m going to a church with Bo, because my mother would rather me not go to church at all than go to a Catholic church. Which makes no sense to me. Catholics, Protestants, Christians, Baptists . . . they all believe in the same things, I think. They just have different ways of saying it.
All those years, I thought she was only standing in her own way, and now I know she had no choice. When your options are limited to being miserable in private or being mortified in public, there is no choice. I can’t get on the plane.
Beautiful, he says. Fat, I think. But can’t I be both at the same time?
I don’t even want to win, but I think there’s this survival instinct inside all of us that clicks on when we see other people failing. It makes me feel gross and incredibly human.
He’s from Philadelphia or Boston or one of those places where people are always yelling,
let the glitter fall where it may.
But I feel good, and who needs beauty sleep when you’ve got champagne?
There’s something about swimsuits that make you think you’ve got to earn the right to wear them. And that’s wrong. Really, the criteria is simple. Do you have a body? Put a swimsuit on it.
Sometimes figuring out who you are means understanding that we are a mosaic of experiences.
I guess sometimes the perfection we perceive in others is made up of a whole bunch of tiny imperfections, because some days the damn dress just won’t zip.
