More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But dozens of eyeballs stared at me like I was a lonely tree and they were lumberjacks, their faces dancing with visions of firewood and newspaper and Tinkertoys.
The disappointment flowed out of their eyes as the love disappeared, and a distant sadness froze their features. A glacier of lost hope and faith in me, their eyes squinting as if they were trying to reconcile the daughter who screwed up with the daughter they hoped I would be.
Ms. Leery loomed before us. She was a tall, thin woman with wide shoulders and a pale face that had the texture of an omelet. A mole grew on her left cheek like a lonely olive. Her beige pantsuit was the color of a tea stain.
Ms. Leery had simmering moods and explosive ones; you never knew what might set her off. It was rarely big things that made her explode, but tiny things—if she saw you chewing gum or you accidentally dropped a wrapper on the floor, the volcano erupted and ash rained down for hours.
“Stop that bouncing on your ball, Miss Clark. Reasonable bouncing only.” I kept drawing the apples, trying not to move. Being at Thornton froze you in time, sort of strangled you everywhere, this smashed feeling always, deep inside you. This fear. What were we so afraid of? Never measuring up to her standards. Those standards had been imprinted on us since we arrived and this slow and constant squashing began. I was sixteen now but short for my age, and I felt smaller at Thornton every day. “The bouncing, Miss Clark. Enough. Come here. Bring me your ball.” I stood up and carried it to the
...more
“We did what was best for you,” my parents always said. “We had no choice.”
Dyna flew home. Her mom died eight days later. The night Dyna returned to school, I woke up in the dark in our dorm room and she was crying. Her shadow shook above her narrow bed, across the room from mine. I sat beside her and held her. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell her, Everything will be okay and It will get better, but the moment Nana had died, I’d lost my whole life. I knew it sounded melodramatic. Don’t be a drama queen. No hysterics, my dad would say. But after Nana died, the person I used to be disappeared. And when Dyna left Thornton, it had unearthed the old grief
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
At night sometimes I ached especially for the redbud tree with its strange doughnut-shaped knots that I worshipped, and the pink clouds blooming on its trunk every spring—cauliflory, my grandmother called it. I loved that word. That word was gone now, too, as if I could no longer speak an entire language.
When we lived in the purple cottage, I felt like myself, I never doubted who I was. Maybe we’re made up of the people and things we love—Nana, Dyna, the house, the redbud tree—and what’s left of us when they’re gone?
Most of all, her death felt like a landslide had come through and pulled my skin off. Except the skin grew back so I looked normal on the outside, completely untouched, but on the inside it had scrambled and roughed up all my organs, left rocks and sand and debris inside me. It hurt to move. It hurt to stay still. The weirdest thing was that after a while, I couldn’t cry. It was like the tears had gotten trapped inside the mud and debris, stuck there, and that’s what felt so heavy inside me all the time, the weight of all that water. Then we found Gertrude, and for a while, everything began to
...more
The squeak changed to a guttural yowl, like a singer who’d swallowed a toad.
In the kitchen, Flo said, “This isn’t a he, it’s a she. One tough, battle-worn lady. Sweet girl, though, I’ll tell you that. Knows good people when she meets them. Kittens like this, if you love them right up, they’ll be healthy in no time.
“There’s definitely no cat food in the bin marked ‘Cornmeal’ in the walk-in pantry,” Flo told us.
We named her Gertrude Badass. Gertrude was Dyna’s grandmother’s name and Nana’s middle name—one of the coincidences we shared, which we loved. Maybe they’d sent this kitten to us.
Sometimes she slept with her paws on my shoulders like a cat necklace.
Flo snuck toy mice for Gertrude into the cornmeal bin, too, and even little tubs of catnip and extra large socks. “Be careful,” she warned us. “Make sure nobody finds out.”
A fake tree leaned against the wall in a perpetual state of non-growth.
Her face was like a topographical map, with blue veins as the interstates and the mole as a capital city.
And agent of emotional torture.
He’d called me Cricket since I was a baby, when I made soft, chirpy sounds.
In his writing, capitals popped up in his sentences like lost gophers.
“Shit,” I mouthed under my breath. Ms. Leery’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t sass, Lucy Clark. Apologize to your parents immediately. Show them respect. You will do what is asked of you without whining and complaint. They’re only trying to find an opportunity that’s best for you.” I hesitated. “Now,” she said. “I’m sorry.” “Like you mean it. You shouldn’t feel resentment for people who are trying to help you.” She waited. She loved watching my pain. I think it fed her, literally; her muscles seemed to grow and multiply, and she seemed taller and stronger as she sat there. I stared at the phone, the
...more
She loves you very, very much. I carried that inside me, a tiny jewel buried in coal.
I took out a book—a blank book. A diary. It had a Your Authentic Path logo on the back, with a rising sun. “If you look inside, there are prompts and exercises and at the top of each day, a space to write your daily goals and the food you’ve consumed—of course it’s not only food, it’s what keeps you nourished and energized to Change—and the habit of keeping it will help you stay on track. I think it will really turn things around. Maybe, down the road, you can share what you’ve written with us,” my father said.
My heart whirred every time I spoke to him—I wanted him to say I was actually not a bad daughter and everything was perfectly fine and it was wonderful that he’d been paying tuition to have pancakes thrown at my head.
I stared at the now-quiet phone, as if it were a land mine or a meteorite that had blown up my life.
The Things were masters at sticking a knife in your soul (or your cell parts) while pretending it was a concerned pat on the shoulder.
It was like watching a circus for free.
quoted a phones-are-the-devil news article. “The internet has destroyed the way teenagers think.” I’d pointed out that he probably read that article on his phone and made his living off videos people watched on their phones. He changed the subject.
My clothes looked like dish towels compared to hers.
Baskets of ivy drizzled their leaves along the brick walls. A small potted tree leaned over our table, as if it were eavesdropping.
The waiter placed a bread basket in front of us; the bread was pillowy and sweet and slightly sour at once, the opposite of the hardtack at Thornton.
Even Nanette’s words seemed to slither. They snaked around, those compliments, wanting something in return. I wondered what.
She tapped the tree, as if waking it up. “I can’t imagine how they described me to you. They probably made it sound as if you’d be assisting a decrepit geezer. A batty old lady.” Her eyes sparkled. Her smile was like a light switching on in a dark room. “Things aren’t always what they seem, are they? What’s on the surface is never the whole story, is it?”
She crumpled it up and handed it to the busboy as he walked by. “Well. That’s that,” she said. “Let’s have a fresh start, shall we?” I gazed at her. I hoped she actually meant this. “Now, a little bit more about my expectations. What I’m looking for in an assistant. I’ll explain more in the coming days, but what’s most important is to notice things. To see. To observe and let me know what you think. And of course, to help in daily tasks—they told you about the garden, didn’t they?”
“My ideal assistant would take notes and help me make sense of what’s happening. Stay by my side. Help me remember things, and handle complications, and . . . oh no.”
“Is that who we were running from?” He looked more like a kind woodchuck in a children’s fable than a murderer.
His whole face softened when he looked at her, with what seemed to be a deep and genuine kind of love—I’d almost never seen anything remotely romantic outside of movies and TV series, and I felt sort of shocked to watch it. Thornton occasionally held dances with the Chester Wallfinger boys’ school, where their idea of tender affection was to launch a spitball at you. This was like being transported to the 1800s.
“I’m afraid I’ve been unkind to him—I haven’t been returning his calls or texts or voicemails.” She looked embarrassed. “That’s totally normal. We call that ghosting now. You don’t like him?” “I do like him. It’s just—so much has been happening lately, it’s almost like I feel muffled. Like I feel so overwhelmed that I can’t hear what I think or want.”
She looked me in the eyes. “Honestly, the main thing I’m looking for in an assistant, above all else, is this: I’m looking for someone who can help me see the truth.”
I liked her open-mindedness, how she’d crumpled the rules, and that she already seemed to trust me.
She continued to study me. Her eyes were so intense and piercing, I looked away. I was almost afraid to look up at her again. Afraid that she could see through me, could see all the broken things inside me, my flaws and failures.
“I don’t want to go back to Texas.” I didn’t know how to say that I couldn’t go to my parents.
He was like an overgrown frat brother with no fraternity, posting selfies on ships in his fashionable glasses and pastel shirts tucked into his pressed pants, wineglass in hand, always.
“When we said goodbye at the airport, he actually said, ‘It’s a relief now in many ways. Her suffering is over. We can finally move on from this chapter of our lives.’
She put three fingers on her lips. It was a gesture she and her mom shared during her mom’s treatments, when her mom’s throat hurt too much to talk. It meant I love you.
When Edith and I had left the restaurant, I’d glanced into the window of a shoe shop and saw a girl who looked like Dyna. My heart thumped—it wasn’t her, of course. A Dyna mirage. All hope and longing.
So she had meant sad-loser unique. I was only here because my father bought advertising in her magazine. I knew it had to be transactional, that she wouldn’t have told Edith I was resilient and gifted unless she was getting something in return.
This is exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Harbor a teenager and store cans.”
Dyna once said that certain people seized on the sadness in you—the Things, Ms. Leery, Nanette now, too—as if they could sense the pain, the weak spot in you.
