The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes, #2)

by Brittany Cavallaro

I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down. After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed.

That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before lunch.

Everyone in this house seemed to exist in opposition to themselves, anger and love and loyalty and fear all layered over each other into an incomprehensible blur.

She looked like a whisper made real.

What struck me the most was how none of the graffiti had been covered up. It was like the city was made of it, this twinned transformation and discontent, and the storefronts that stood new and clean began to look unfinished, somehow, at least to me.

His offices were just like him—old-fashioned and stuffy, like the MI-5 of old spy novels. It was like he’d cherry-picked his favorite fictional references and rearranged them into a hodgepodge of mismatched places and times.

Whenever I was in a new place by myself, I was always aware of how I was walking, what I was looking at, worried that I’d seem like a tourist and be slighted somehow for it.

you’re a little too spot-on to play a prospective art student.

“Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?” I asked him, because I was good at taking those kinds of openings. “No,” he said, “it’s actually quite fun,”

Haha

Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood.

normal kind of fun, when I used to go hang out at the pub on long afternoons, having the kinds of conversations where I didn’t feel like I needed an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a scorekeeper. Where my friends liked me and I liked them, and that was the whole of it. When I could go home and bicker with my sister and read a book in bed and not worry that everything I cared about was retreating slowly out of my grip.

a city where art was everywhere, transforming everything, a public act of reclamation.

It’s like all of it stays in some little box inside you that . . . bursts open when you take a moment to settle down.”

Holmes had always had such a tenuous connection to her surroundings, like she was more real than anything around her.

Maybe she was so endlessly fascinating because the world hadn’t ever scratched up against me the way it did her, leaving her raw and unhappy and wanting to disappear.

They all have so much overwhelming affection for each other, these students, like they’re all drowning and simultaneously holding each other’s lifelines.

4. My Parents . . . how to put this? Ideally they would remain living.

HAHAHA Holmes trying to express emotion is so funny

They all must come before #5, the hardest of all, which is to Keep Watson Happy. (One might argue that I rank this the lowest on my priority list because it proves to be the most difficult, and I dislike failure.)

It’s strange to grieve for your former self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so many skins, I hardly know what I am now—muscle, maybe, or just memory. Perhaps just the will to keep going.

I would rather Watson be at home, doing research and reading novels, because one prefers to have their heart locked safely in their chest.

Jamie was the only escape from myself I’d ever found. When I was beside him, I understood who I was. I spoke to him, and I liked the words I said. I spoke to him, and the words he said back surprised me. Sharpened me.

It was incredible the lengths people would go to to feel like they were in the know.

How could you look at a girl like that and trust her with anything other than your life? That isn’t me being flippant, understand. I imagine she’d do anything to keep you alive. But giving her your heart is like handing a glass figurine to a child. She’ll flip it over, peer through it like a lens. Shake it to see if it makes a sound. In the end, it will slip her hands and shatter. In the end, it’s your fault. You were the one who gave it to her.

I know what it’s like, trying to make a myth out of your life while you’re living it.