More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You always had to be on your guard. It didn’t matter how often you passed, it could always be taken away. Always. She’d never be little, she’d never be fish. It could always be taken away.
What’s up with your life, kid? I’ve always got my own shit. You’re always like, ‘Oh, everything’s fine, it’s all fine!’ Talk to me. You can’t be all be rose-coloured piss.” My best friend is dead. My best friend killed herself. I’m getting laid off and I’m doing tricks again and I’m scared a thing that happened to my friend is going to happen to me. But I’m making money. I’m almost certainly making more money than you. A man did something to me in an alley weeks ago, and I’m burying it because too much else has happened. Your father might’ve been a woman, but I can never tell you that, ever,
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
No she wasn’t any happier, no she didn’t feel any more like a real girl. But she was calmer now, like a small buzzing part of her brain had been turned off, and was now forever at rest.
Here, here is my skin that feels like your skin, my muscles and frailties that feel like yours, the lift of your flesh something I intuitively know from my own body, inner maps that, for most of my life, I thought were purely shameful and mine alone. And here, with you, with me, for minutes, for hours, if nothing else—a line from a book Wendy couldn’t remember appeared to her in a slippery ripple of memory—If I loved you, this is how I would love you.
Wendy took off her layers, and memories of sandy-faced Mennonite kids running into houses for family visits went through her like wind. She wondered if Sophie would’ve felt as much like a boy as she did just then.
For years now, sex kept changing on her. Her own desire felt milky, like silt, something in a river, something she could see until she tried to hold it and make it function, and it ran through her fingers into nothing.
What kind of world does the core of your brain expect that you, you personally, get to live in? Wendy wanted to be loved. However easily she might have abandoned or ruined her prospects, Wendy did still believe she would have love.
