Tell The Wolves I'm Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

thing is, if you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you’re in the Middle Ages. That’s why I did it. That’s what I was in it for.

understood that I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.

in my experience, things your parents are keeping quiet about are things you don’t want to know.

Plus, once you had a friend like Finn, it was almost impossible to find someone in high school who came anywhere close.

Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close.

The Cloisters are the best because they’re like a piece of another time right at the top of Manhattan. And I’m not just saying that. They’re actually made of huge chunks of French medieval monasteries that were shipped to New York and stuck together. Even the view from the Cloisters is perfect, because Rockefeller bought all the land on the other side of the river in New Jersey just so nothing could be built there. Maybe even Rockefeller needed to leave his time once in a while.

All my parents’ music came from greatest hits albums. It was like the thought of getting even one bum track was too much for them to handle.

then maybe I thought it would be possible to use what Toby had to hold Finn together, to keep him here with me a little bit longer.

I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight.

No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story—more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day—made me want to scream.

Like we were one solid, unbreakable thing.

Things you’d never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you’d want to show.

suppose Matilda’s the girl who felt like home.”

It seemed like he was the only one I knew in the world who I could call up and just say nothing to.

when it’s only you and your sister, you can do any embarrassing thing you want.

You never get who people are to you. Ben, Beans, Finn, Greta.

somehow Toby had gone out into the woods and brought back Greta for me. He’d brought me back my sister.

I realized that Toby was shining through me so strongly then that for a moment I was almost completely invisible.