56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t realize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day. She wonders what that does to a person.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

“It’s not secrets I like. It’s discovering things that are new to me but actually were always there. Secrets are a different thing. They’re destructive.”

In between favorite movies and what they studied in college and where they hope to go this summer, they forgot to ask each other what kind of person are you in a global pandemic?

“Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”

“Dividing people into good and evil is just lazy.”

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most.

“Do you ever think,” Karl says, “that maybe you have your shit together, it’s just that your shit doesn’t look like everybody else’s?”