After His Banana

by Penelope Bloom

She knew I was broke, but I don’t think she had any idea how thin the tightrope I was walking really was.

I’d spent my formative years attending Hogwarts and spoke with an awesome British accent, and it wasn’t like I was wasting time or energy pursuing that dream, either.

I’d actually thought many times about how Grammy functioned like a highly contagious disease might. You might not want it to attach itself to you, but if it chose to, there wasn’t much you could do about it.

What’s the cooking equivalent of being in the closet?” Grammy pursed her lips and tapped them, then she lit up. “You’re in the oven, Miles. You need to come out of the oven to your dad. I’m also shit at keeping secrets. I’m bound to let it slip, eventually.”

“If you wait until the door is closed to fuck, you’d miss out on all the best sex.

Granted, some of those had been unsolicited dick pics. Okay, most of them. And one had been so small that I’d accused the sender of trying to give me child pornography, which had resulted in the most epic backtracking I’d ever seen from a guy.

she had created a highly successful career pretty much all on her own, and she was one of the few people I knew who could go toe to toe with Uncle William.

I’ve always liked puzzles. People’s brains are like a big, mostly impossible to solve puzzle.

I think we all have broken hearts from the get-go. That’s what growing up is. You realize your heart is all screwed up and imperfect. The only way to fix it is finding that person who can make it whole. And I think sometimes people settle for ‘whole enough,’ or one person might feel more whole than the other. But everybody deserves to be whole, and you won’t know if somebody is the right fit for you unless you take a few risks and put your heart out there.”

It was rare to find someone as gorgeous as Rey, who didn’t get her confidence from the way she looked,

I may only be thirteen, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing that makes a guy’s penis shrivel up and retreat inside his body.”

we’re all cowards. The real answer is because we’ve got a version of ourselves we want the world to see. Then there’s the real us. We keep it tucked away behind what we show people, and as long as we never let the real thing come to the surface, nothing can touch us.

If people hate you, they just hate the version of yourself you let them see. It’s not really you that they hate.”

if people love you, it’s not really you that they love, is it?”

It’s like you want people to think you’re this carefree guy. But on the inside, I think you do care about things.”

“You know what ‘fine’ is code for? It’s what people say when they are upset about something, and they want to talk about it without actually talking about it.”

I firmly believed the key to happiness was helping people find their way to a life slightly better than the one they thought they deserved.

I did my best British accent. “Put that on you fucking donkey.”

“Hey, you know what the best thing about Switzerland is?” Rey looked at me, squinting in confusion. “What?” “I don’t know, but the flag is a big plus.”

one of my mottos was when something is afoot, a wise man treads lightly because he doesn’t want to step on it by mistake.

There’s this famous quote. Basically, it says most people don’t fail because they aimed too high and didn’t make it. They fail because they aim too low and they succeed.”

Learning to love someone was being part of the recipe. It was bringing two things together that were less when they were apart.

“You two can sit there and act like you’re not jealous. I’m going to eat my… sugar balloon flavored smoke thing.”