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Besides, this meant she was going to need wooing after all. He was delighted. Penn was a student of narrative and knew that lovers should be wooed, relationships fought for, that anything too easily won was soon lost or else not worth winning. He suspected she was worth winning.
children being the enemies of plans and also the enemies of anything new besides themselves.
How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?
Rosie felt only fear. Rosie felt deafened by the voices howling in her head that she was mad to consent to this, that it was her judgment which was not to be trusted. And underneath that cacophony she could just make out the narrator who pointed quite peaceably to the fork in the road before them. The path on the right was paved and shady, rolling gently along a childhood filled with acceptance to an adulthood marked by requited love, grandchildren, and joy, whereas the other path was rock-strewn and windblown, uphill both directions, and led she had no idea where. Here she was at the
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This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what’s good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don’t get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s entire future and happiness is at stake. It’s impossible. It’s heartbreaking. It’s maddening. But there’s no alternative.’
Penn wondered where boys learned that, that trick of attracting girls by grossing them out, which only worked for a few years, like flirting training wheels. Maybe boys had it all along, that razor’s-edge balance of disgusting and charming, and for many years they didn’t notice or care, and for a few years girls found it fascinating, and for the rest of the time, men fought to keep it under wraps and only let it out when they were alone.
Their life felt unfolded, a cardboard box they’d broken down and flattened back to a plain square then refolded into something unrecognizable.
And so she missed it, his warning, his fledgling teenage foresight that secrets are miserable things, that secrets, be they deliberate or accidental, will out, and then it won’t matter where you live, for no place anywhere can protect you from the power and the fallout of a secret once exploded.
Rosie envied the dog, for whom it was socially acceptable to walk around whining ceaselessly when she was feeling anxious.
The wood was dark indeed, perilous and terrifying, but Penn could see a way through. She didn’t want to bar that path to him. But she wasn’t sure that around the bend up ahead, it didn’t plunge into the sea.
He watched her behind her closed lids and said nothing for moments that stretched on like Wyoming highways.
Trans and gender nonconforming kids and adults suffer a suicide-attempt rate of more than 40 percent.
