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She sits slumped in the hard metal chair, chin resting on one bandaged hand as the other traces nonsense symbols onto the surface of the stainless steel table. Her eyes are half-closed, deep shadows bruising the skin beneath, and her black hair is dull and unwashed, scraped back into a messy knot. She’s exhausted, clearly. But he wouldn’t call her traumatized.
Just . . . well, he can’t really call it comfort. “You’ll die or you won’t, now relax for the doctors so they can work” wasn’t exactly reassuring, but that’s exactly how the other girls seemed to take it.
Which makes some of them wonder if she’s a victim at all.
She shakes her head. “He was the Gardener.”
You learn things over time, and that was one of the biggest things I learned about him. He wanted to find more joy in life than he did.
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“Tomorrow’s my twenty-first birthday,” she whispered. Bliss squeaked and threw her arms around our friend, burying her face in Lyonette’s shoulder. “Fuck, Lyon, I’m so sorry!” “We have an expiration date then?” I asked quietly. “Twenty-one?”
“If you’re a rapist, I’m all dried up, don’t waste your time! If you’re a thief, I have nothing worth stealing, and if you’re a murderer, shame on you!”
As a group, all our behaviors were learned from other Butterflies, who had learned it from other Butterflies, because the Gardener had been taking girls for over thirty fucking years.
“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”
The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.
Yet if hope has flown away in a night, or in a day, or in none, is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness.
“Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.”
“They weren’t just fellow captives, were they?” Victor asks after giving her a moment to collect herself. “They were your friends.” “Some of them are friends. All of them are family. I guess that’s just what happens.”
It was subtler than Nazira’s drawings or Bliss’s figures, but the same impulse.
But each time I saw it, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that not everyone found or was capable of recognizing and sustaining.
“He promised we would take care of her.” “He did.” “But he . . . he . . .” “Put her out of pain, and prevented her from decay,” I said neutrally. “. . . murdered her.”
“Yes, you are,” I snapped. “You could have prevented this! If you had just gone to the police, or let one of us go so we could go to the police, Avery wouldn’t have been free to kidnap her, to savage her, to rape her, to bring her here where it will happen to her again and again and again until she’s dead too young. You allowed this to happen, Desmond, actively allowed it, so yes, you are the one who hurt her. If you’re not going to do anything to help her, you need to get the hell away from her.”
His father slapped him so hard he stumbled back and fell. “This is my home, and my garden. Here, I am the law, and you went against that.”
