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Everything is perfect, but nothing is right.
If family was what nourished women, her mother would be a dancing skeleton;
Like most things in her life, fighting back only makes things infinitely worse.
This current version of Patricia is a creation, her mother’s own little…experiment. And it worked, damn her.
Every man after that has been merely a necessity, a ladder rung to safety and then, much later, when she’d earned it, to comfort.
in public, Hayden treats her like a princess. He puts her on a pedestal. She wants to jump off.
In books, the bad boy is really a good boy who shows his good side only to the girl he loves. But in real life, the good boys are all hiding the fact that they’re really bad boys, and no one believes it until it’s too late.
That makes one of her friends a bad friend, but she doesn’t know who it is, and she suspects all of them would be glad to take her place. Or at least they think they would.
“Oh, I bet the boys will still kiss you. I know I would!” Mr. Brannen winks and grins.
Umm gag
That’s how it always is with Mr. Brannen—everything he says feels totally inappropriate and gross, but if it was repeated to the counselor or the police, it could be written off as normal and innocent, as just another girl being histrionic over nothing.
the same one his mother used to wear.
Weird wanting your wife to smell like your mother
He wasn’t like this when they started dating. He was fun and playful and sweet—or maybe, she thinks now, he excelled at hiding his own true self.
On the day that Ella was born, he didn’t want to be in the delivery room; he said that if he saw her body doing something that disgusting, he would never look at her the same way again.
Um excuse you!! You helped put that baby in her, sir
she’d never say the word Daddy again,
Before it happened, the boys weren’t talking or even paying attention to each other. Jordan wasn’t bullying Thomas, didn’t steal his lunch or threaten him or laugh at him or even look at him. He was talking to Stevie and eating a sandwich, just being normal. They were all just being normal.
He’s in his twenties and looks like a cleft-chinned movie star, and Marissa’s chest follows him around the room like she’s a satellite dish tuning in to a prime channel.
Lmao
one more thing her husband has steered her toward, pushing her inexorably into something she swore she’d never do.
her mother? Well, that would be like running away from a wolf and directly toward a lion.
No man should do that to a woman. No one should do it to anyone.
There’s a strange, hungry ferocity about his grin, and a cold trickle crawls down her spine as she realizes that she’s seen her dad look at her mom this way. And, once, at Ella herself.
As she drives past Beth on the stairs, the older girl holds up her phone and silently points to it. Bleeding, aching, bruised, possibly concussed, Ella nods and chuckles to herself, a mad, half-sobbing sound. Some kids at her school have leaked nudes, which spread like wildfire. But if she knows how things work, soon everyone is going to see firsthand what their golden boy did to her.
Aw so she was helping in her own way
It takes everything she has to keep a straight face. Her stern, angry husband has been interrupted by yodeling. By yodeling. Fucking. Bears.
LMAO
She reaches into the freezer and hands each of her daughters a Girl Scout cookie from his private stash, his last box. It’s a petty little fuck you, but it feels good.
I know you, she tells them with each backhanded compliment. I know your secrets. I know your fears. I know your pride.
The rage she sees there—the fury, the hate, the absence of humanity—it makes her step back and clutch her heart.
Attempts to hurt one particular target that, if unstopped, will result in their death.
She’s pretty sure the cops and EMTs all knew it wasn’t actually the Violence, that it was just regular old domestic abuse, but no one questioned that part of the story. She could see the pity in their eyes—well,
For a moment, Chelsea isn’t sure who is the child and who is the parent, and that only makes her cry all the harder for the burden Ella’s been forced to bear.
what she hates even more is that she’s been made to feel this way twice in one night by two different men who should be protecting her.
“Three women, alone in the world. Lot of scary things can happen.” “Something scary happened tonight.” Again, that overbright smile. “I’m sure it did. You know, Chel, sometimes people make mistakes.” Now her smile is overbright. “They sure do, Officer Huntley. For years, sometimes. Years and years. Here’s to hoping things go right for once.
In a fit of what can only be considered suicidal exhaustion, Chelsea rubs at the tenderest bruise on her jaw with her middle finger.
Lmao
All those years David halfheartedly threatened Chelsea with his “friends on the force,” she’d had no idea those friends were exactly the same thing as David. Predators, hiding in plain sight.
The other is from David’s best friend, Brian. The lawyer. He’s going to take everything, you bitch. I’ll see to it. All the masks, she realizes, are coming off.
she doesn’t like the way they look at her now. She hates it when they tell her she’s pretty, like she owes them something in return.
Those are the same words her dad said to her mom when he had her by the throat. You did this. Ella is totally certain she did not make her boyfriend be an asshole who pushed her around and hit her in the school parking lot. She’s very certain her mom didn’t make her dad get drunk and beat her. Why is it that when men act out it’s always someone else’s fault?
It’s because her mom knows her dad doesn’t have the Violence. What she doesn’t know is that Ella also knows this because Ella has seen it firsthand and her mother has not.
And her mom has the Violence. Not like her dad or Hayden, but the actual disease. Whatever it is. The real Violence.
Chelsea looked down at her feet and saw blood and bits of pink guts, and her first thought was that she’d killed Brooklyn. Brooklyn, her precious baby, whom she loves more than life. The relief that flooded her when she saw that it was Olaf made her feel like a sociopath. At least it wasn’t one of her daughters. It was bad, but it could’ve been so much worse.
She has to be there for her girls while firmly physically separated from them. They must stay together, but they must stay apart.
That’s one of the oddest things about this disease, or whatever it is—no one who suffers it remembers it, and no one with them generally survives.
how useless beauty is when you’re just trying to survive,
They don’t know much about the Violence yet, but they do know one thing for certain: It’s only happening in tropical places.
Exercise makes her feel conflicted—she needs it for her mental health, but she hates that in getting stronger, she makes herself a more dangerous predator for the sickness hiding inside her.
Someone finally connected the dots and figured out that it’s spread by mosquitoes—hence why it’s in all the hot places—but they don’t yet know what triggers the violent outbursts. Most sufferers have their first attack shortly after being infected,
with as much money as her mother has, she can buy her way out of any real problems.
Because that’s the thing: As far as she can tell, they really are broke.
Because he expects a victim of domestic violence to kiss the feet of the man who abuses her instead of being grateful every day that he’s gone.
We pay for her vaccination, and in return she signs an ironclad contract committing her to ten years of service.
Wow so basically indentured servitude
Being married to Randall makes everything easy. Well, everything except living with him.
