You'll Be the Death of Me

by Karen M. McManus

Here’s the thing about powerhouse people: you have no idea how much they take on until they can’t do it all anymore.

Relate! 😞

“Didn’t Gabe get voted Most Likely to Commit a Felony and Not Get Caught?” Carlton High did away with yearbook senior superlatives like Best-Looking and Most Likely to Succeed years ago, deeming them “unhealthy labeling,” so now seniors have their own underground list with categories that change every year.

Because, yeah…that’s way healthier 😆😆😆

That’s Ivy for you; she has this way of making observations that seem like throwaways, but end up being weirdly deep enough that you think about them years later.

Deeep

“Give me Sugar Babies any day.” “You’re so random. You know you’re the only person in the world who still eats those, right?”

I eat them…shhh

“Sometimes I look at these results and wonder where on earth he came from. We’re no slackers, James, but Daniel is…” “Extraordinary,” Dad finished. His voice held a note of wonder, like he’d just learned magic was real, and a hot spike of jealousy ran through me. I hadn’t known, until right then, how much I would have liked my father to talk about me like that.

I ended up seeing Infinity War with Daniel, of all goddamn people. My extraordinary brother, thief of Sugar Babies and dreams.

“Thief of sugar babies and dreams” - it doesn’t get much worst than that!

You can be right in principle and still wrong in approach, Mom used to tell me when I’d get frustrated that other kids in student government wouldn’t follow my lead. Nobody likes to feel steamrolled.

Wes likes to say that Henry can’t talk about his feelings, so you have to pay attention to how he shows them. Mateo is the same way. “He likes you, too.”

It didn’t occur to me, until just now, that focusing on Ms. Jamison’s bad behavior has been a highly effective way to ignore my own.

We all do it!

We’re all sitting in the back of the murder van, surrounded by boxes of knives and sharpening tools, because the windowless interior feels safer than Cal’s car.

This has to be my favorite quote from the book 😆

Tears might be healthy, but she hasn’t earned these. Other people suffered—really suffered—for what she did, not her.

My entire life would be different if she’d minded her damn business and kept that baby oil in her bag where it belonged. Baby oil. Jesus. Of all the possible ways to get your world destroyed, that has to be the most pointless.

“Oh, Mateo. You’re not fine, but you’ll never admit it, will you?” She sighs, then adds the same thing she always does. “You’ll be the death of me.”

They were still magnets vibrating in each other’s presence, but—I flipped them. All the things that used to draw them together started pushing them apart, until they were so far away from one another that I was left standing alone in the middle.

“I’m leaving,” Ivy says. I shrug with pretend nonchalance. “This isn’t Logan Airport. You don’t have to announce your departure.”

😆

Now I’m running the last four years between me and Daniel through an AITA filter, wondering if all the things he did that I thought were deliberate and malicious were actually reactions.

“That I preferred extreme failure to admitting I needed help. Which is a problem, isn’t it? Because I’ve passed that exact characteristic on to the two of you.”

Then he says some more things. But I don’t hear them, because Lara lifts her left hand to tuck a wisp of hair behind her ear, and blood starts pounding in my ears as I see the flash of a new diamond on her finger.

“We’re going scorched earth,” I say.

Let’s do this! 🔥