All the Missing Girls
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between August 6 - September 4, 2024
4%
Flag icon
Maybe it’s the fact that you can’t see anything beyond here when you’re in it. Just mountains and forest and you. That’s it.
4%
Flag icon
Hands on the ceiling over the railroad tracks, a kiss when the church bells chimed twelve, and no breathing around the dead.
5%
Flag icon
I always did this. Tried to compensate by going to the other extreme.
6%
Flag icon
I smiled without meaning to, because it was Tyler.
10%
Flag icon
I hated that the ghosts of us lived here, always.
41%
Flag icon
The way she’d love him, surely, when he did. Nobody would ever love you so fiercely, so meanly, so thoroughly. And the parts of you that you wanted to keep hidden—she loved those most of all.
42%
Flag icon
How could I not love Corinne Prescott back then? How could anyone not? I liked to believe it was for things like this and not because I was drawn to the mean in her, or how she could destroy things without flinching—a dying bird, an abandoned barn. I liked to believe she did these things because she loved me, too.
46%
Flag icon
Tyler was starting to feel like a ghost, like if I blinked for too long, he might slip away for good.
49%
Flag icon
I always leave people behind. Holiday greeting cards last one apartment, and then I move, no forwarding address. Emails go unanswered. Phone calls unreturned. It’s a habit. It’s easier. I’m the friend in the group they’ll throw a going-away party for but never keep in touch with. I had ladder rungs to climb, debts to repay, a life to create.
50%
Flag icon
They were the people you called with news: I met a guy. I’m engaged. I got a new job. To share the highs and the lows. But friends to call for the deep things, the things that live in the dark spaces of our hearts? Those people didn’t exist for me any longer.
51%
Flag icon
Maybe they knew I had seen darker things. That I would understand. Or perhaps they would sense that I am an excellent keeper of secrets. I am.
51%
Flag icon
“IF I WERE A monster,” Corinne had told us on the front porch with the lanterns swinging and the shadows dancing, “I’d pretend to be human.”
58%
Flag icon
the cold on his face, the rainwater in his shoes, the sky whispering to him about love and loneliness and me.
75%
Flag icon
But maybe there was nothing more intimate than someone knowing all your secrets, every one of them, and sitting beside you anyway, buying your favorite food, running his fingers absently through your hair so you can sleep.
75%
Flag icon
If there’s a feeling to coming home—something comforting and nostalgic: a mother’s cooking, a family pet sleeping at the foot of the bed, an old hammock strung between trees in the yard—for me, it’s this. It’s Tyler.
75%
Flag icon
Knowing that there’s someone who has seen all the different versions of me; watched as they stacked themselves away inside one another; knows all the choices I’ve made, the lies I’ve told, the things I’ve lost, and still.
81%
Flag icon
Sad and quiet and pushed around. She saw me as the broken girl. She didn’t know the other parts of me. She didn’t know me at all.
83%
Flag icon
We all have two faces.
88%
Flag icon
It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD
90%
Flag icon
The box is full of lies, but none of them has the same type of power. There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more powerful, nothing more necessary and essential for survival than the lies we tell ourselves.
92%
Flag icon
His world was black and white. He could not look into the darkness, or take it home with him, or love it.
92%
Flag icon
He’d never welcome the monster into his heart.
93%
Flag icon
Even the strong are lonely. Even the adored are sad. I hoped she loved her in that moment—when no one else did.
93%
Flag icon
You want to believe you’re not the saddest person in the world.
93%
Flag icon
The woods have eyes and monsters and stories. We are them as much as they are us.
95%
Flag icon
Corinne was beautiful, and a monster, and I loved her once. But in the end, I abandoned her, like everyone else.
95%
Flag icon
If there’s a feeling to home, it’s this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried: not the past and not yourself.