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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Words line up and push one another out of her mouth like buffalo pushed over the edge of a cliff.
She shrugs. “Nothing wrong with money.” “No, yeah, it’s just—it cheapens it somehow.” “Money does the opposite of cheapening something.”
She has to believe in somebody, because believing in herself just isn’t enough.
Then, a big empty canyon of silence separates them. A silence so epic, it’s almost loud—like it generates its own kind of noise, a white noise that fills the ears, a blood noise.
“Well, I’m glad I was able to be your stepladder. Even if that means I have to clean your boot print off my back.”
“You know us womenfolk. Always on our periods, crying at every dish-soap commercial or country song.”
“I’m a good guy,” he says finally. “I’m a fireman.” “That don’t make you a good guy. It just makes you a fireman.
She’s not sure she has it right, what the authors really were laying down, but she’s also not sure it matters. Because once the writers are done with it, it’s not theirs anymore. It’s hers.
What you do comes back at you, like a whip biting you on your own chin, or a boomerang circling through the air.
I don’t want anybody opening their door and dinging the paint,” he says, and every time he says it, she just shakes her head. A little dinged paint, so dang what. Life is all about dinged paint.
Gossip at school is like a disease. It’s in the air. You can’t help catching it and sharing it.
Atlanta figures anybody who calls themselves a guru is a know-nothing no-how con artist who just wants to make money pretending to be an expert.
Must be nice, she thinks. Same thing she always thinks when she sees how the other half lives—though, not really the other half so much as the other tiny fraction of humanity. Whatever.
Ugly and poor. That’s how she feels. She hates Samantha for that. More than a little.
Josie offers a high five for that. Atlanta’s not sure what she’s high-fiving, exactly, but she’s not one to reject a proper high-five opportunity. They slap hands. Pow.
But what the victim did or didn’t do doesn’t change the fact that what happened to them is someone else’s fault.
The night zips along, time gobbled down by an uncaring clock.
You’re Atlanta. Atlanta Burns,” she says, and whistles. “Like the city and what Sherman did to the city in 1864,” Atlanta says. “Who’s Sherman?” Atlanta shrugs. “My accountant. Also: my lover. Sherman. Sweet, sweet Sherman.”
“What are you gonna do now?” he asks. She shrugs. “I guess same thing I always do. Burn it all down and see what comes running out of the flames.”
“It was fine,” she says, but her smile betrays her. Stupid smile. Stupid Paul. Stupid hunter safety class.
