Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark.

I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me.

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

I felt it now. Something was wrong, right here, very horribly wrong. I could picture Bob Nash sitting on the edge of Ann’s bed, trying to remember the last thing he said to his daughter. I saw Natalie’s mother, crying into one of her old T-shirts. I saw me, a despairing thirteen-year-old sobbing on the floor of my dead sister’s room, holding a small flowered shoe. Or Amma, thirteen herself, a woman-child with a gorgeous body and a gnawing desire to be the baby girl my mother mourned. My mother weeping over Marian. Biting that baby. Amma, asserting her power over lesser creatures, laughing as she and her friends cut through Natalie’s hair, the curls falling to the tile floor. Natalie, stabbing at the eyes of a little girl. My skin was screaming, my ears banged with my heartbeat. I closed my eyes, wrapped my arms around myself, and wept.

do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait?”

“I can be nice, you know?” she said, her brow still furrowed. She seemed on the edge of tears herself. “I know. It’s just that I’m wondering why you’ve decided to be nice to me now.” “Sometimes I can’t. But right now, I can. When everyone’s asleep and everything’s quiet, it’s easier.”

And if you girls won’t love me, I won’t love you.”

But I wonder more and more if these girls got tangled up with the wrong person. It’s like they were put down. Like a bad animal. Maybe that’s why their teeth were taken.”