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“You must make time for that which matters,” he recited, “for that which defines you: your passion, your progress, your pen. Take it up, and write your own story.”
“But they use this freakishly heavy paper. Like they want the weight of what they’re saying to sink in.”
This small defiance of social norm earned him several notches in Victor’s estimation, and made him instantly more interesting.
“Go forth, students,” he said. “Create change.”
Victor wondered about lots of things. He wondered about himself (whether he was broken, or special, or better, or worse) and about other people (whether they were all really as stupid as they seemed).
He wondered about life, and people, and science, and magic, and God, and whether he believed in any of them.
“Well, when you wonder something,” said Eli, “doesn’t that mean part of you wants to believe in it? I think we want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We want to believe.”
The zeal peeked through at the corners of his mouth, the fascination around his eyes, the energy in his jaw.
And then he smiled, which she noticed he seemed to do a lot before he lied,
“that when you take away a person’s fear of pain, you take away their fear of death? You make them, in their own eyes, immortal. Which of course they’re not, but what’s the saying? We are all immortal until proven otherwise?”
Victor felt something prickle at the edge of his senses, humming. Pain. It wasn’t his.
Nevertheless, he needed to stop talking. He didn’t like people to know how closely he watched, matched, mimicked them.
Fade right into death without noticing.
He wasn’t in the mood for God. Not this morning. “According to your thesis,” he said, “an influx of adrenaline and a desire to survive gave you that talent. Not God. This isn’t divinity, Eli. It’s science and chance.” “Maybe to a point, but when I climbed into that water, I put myself in His hands—” “No,” snapped Victor. “You put yourself in mine.”
Drank and danced with bodies interlocking like puzzle pieces to music loud enough to drown out thoughts?
Victor Vale was not a fucking sidekick.
Science, even completely fictional science, held sway.
She had always been convincing (that was the word her sister liked to use for lying).
hated evenings at the hospital. The whole floor was too quiet, too settled. It was the only time the heavy panic set in, panic that she would never leave, never get to go home. She would be forgotten here, wearing the same pale clothes as everyone else, blending in with the patients and the nurses and the walls, and her family would be outside in the world and she would bleed away like a memory, like a colorful shirt washed too many times.
made Sydney feel like Serena, around whom the seas kept parting.
He had never believed in fate, in destiny. Those things lurked too close to divinity for Victor’s taste, higher powers and the dispensation of agency. No, he chose to see the world in terms of probability, acknowledging the role of chance while taking control wherever it was possible.
Trauma became a kind of hall pass. If only they knew how much trauma he had sustained.
Most of his problems stemmed from the fact that people seemed to think size and intelligence were inversely proportional.
“I just wanted to help.” “No,” he said. “You wanted to play.”
Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.
felt fine, persistently so, suspiciously so, given that for some time that evening he had been an inanimate object instead of a living being.
