Again Again

by E. Lockhart

She was all charm and yet deeply miserable. She was a liar and she hated liars. She loved both truly and wrongheadedly. She appreciated beauty.

To Adelaide, the boy was a promise. He promised her that happiness could still exist, could still be hers.

Human beings were capable of creating beauty and strangeness far beyond what nature offered. Their minds could be weird and grandiose. They could conceive of more than what was in front of them, more than facts they’d learned.

Adelaide wondered: If she weren’t sad underneath her charm and painted nails, would Mikey have loved her all the way?

She felt overwhelmingly stupid. She had ruined everything with her unsavory, unwanted sadness, sadness that made her unlovable and burdensome, sadness that was maybe anger in disguise, maybe anger, leaking out of her, because there was nobody to yell at, nobody to vent it on, no way to burn it off. It had to come out.

It didn’t matter how many articles she had read about self-worth. It didn’t matter that her parents loved her or that Stacey would stand by her, because the important person had turned cold, and that was the person she had showed the most of herself to.

“People befriend me because they think I’m happy. I’m not even sure why they think I’m happy, but they do. I get distracted, and I laugh, and I turn something on in myself that makes me, maybe, fun to be with. And I’m just— I want you to know up front that I’m false advertising.

Adelaide told Stacey S, but she didn’t tell Mikey. She didn’t want to weigh down her first love with her family unhappiness. With Mikey, she wanted to be a shiny, bright girl.

Think of your happy memories. Know they are still in you. They are part of you. And maybe even they ARE you.

The country was going to hell, after all. There were rights to fight for; there were causes to learn about.

“You can think you’re happy and not be happy.”

“And this other guy, he makes you happy?” “It’s not his job to make me happy,” she told him.

She would love herself, even with her sadness and her distractibility, her defenses and her failures.

The process of making would stretch open the universe until it was frighteningly and gloriously wide with possibility.