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no one is evil, only unhappy, and unhappiness festers inside like a sore.
“David,” she says, handing a boy his paper, “seventy-six. Violet, eighty-five. Kristin, ninety-three. Julian…” She stops right in front of me. This close, she’s much scarier. Her eyebrows are two black ink arcs, and her skin looks like wax. “Forty.”
What a bitch
Because when you’re between two shores and no one can see you, you don’t really exist at all.
It’s strange how many ways there are to miss someone. You miss the things they did and who they were, but you also miss who you were to them. The way everything you said and did was beautiful or entertaining or important. How much you mattered.
When you know you’re going to tell someone everything, you see your day through your eyes and theirs, as if they’re living it alongside you. But when you don’t, it isn’t only not seeing double—it’s not seeing at all. Because if they aren’t there, you aren’t either.
“I was trying to make you jealous, but you’re incapable of normal guy feelings.”
I feel like this was stupid on her part.
Anger is such a waste of time.
I used to think struggle was what aged you, but if that were the case, Julian should’ve been a hundred years old. Now I wonder if the opposite is true. Maybe instead of accelerating your age, pain won’t let you grow.
It seems unfair, the way unhappiness flows out of a person, just to ricochet.
Hate ricochets, but kindness does too.
“Because people heal a whole lot faster when they’re with someone who loves them.”
Why does it slow down in the places you don’t want it to, but it speeds away when you’re happy?”
Clark snaps, as if he thinks Julian’s lying.
He's 14 and just survived a terrible trauma and you're treating him like he's a fugitive??? Fuck off and die.
The things I know stay in my head as I stand on my own two feet at the end of the day, and I walk back to my room with my journal to write my list of cages.
“And when you smile…my grandmother calls them big-soul smiles. She says some people have souls so big that they spread out, touching everyone they pass.” Emerald wipes her wet face again. “There are different ways to help people, Adam. There are different ways to do good.”
