Again Again

by E. Lockhart

Cerulean dress and wide eyes, like a lion. A raging wave of disobedient hair. She contains contradictions.”

But you can be talky and paint your fingernails and still be very sad. In fact, you can be talky and paint your fingernails to protect other people from how sad you are.

She said, “I thought you loved me, because you said you loved me.” Mikey said, “I know. I’m sorry.” Mikey said, “I’m leaving later this afternoon.” Mikey said, “I hope we can be friends. I don’t want to lose you.” Mikey said a lot of things, the things people say when they’re ditching someone and want to soften the blow.

“I didn’t think you seemed happy,” said Jack. “You didn’t?” “No. I thought you seemed interesting.”

egg yolk of misery,

“The whole idea of virginity is just a sham tool of the patriarchy anyway.” This was something Stacey had said before. She said there needed to be some better way to measure experience than virgin/nonvirgin because that crap didn’t apply to lesbians the same way and also actually, it was fuzzy and confusing even for hetero people. And why were we measuring experience anyway?

mean actively nice. Besides the bacon. I couldn’t quite tell, is all. He was like, talking to Oscar all the time in the car. Does he make you happy?” “It’s not happy so much as a thrill,” said Adelaide.

“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.