Family of Liars

by E. Lockhart

So I wait. And in waiting, I have to admit that I want this boy, with his broad shoulders and his broken nose, with his excitement about everything. I want a boy who would swim to the boat in his hoodie, who would kneel in front of my mother, who buys lobster socks and presents for his friends. Who kisses the way he kisses. Who calls me clever and impressive and beautiful.

I walk a path of my parents’ making. I walk it the same way I walk the wooden walkways they’ve made that stretch across Beechwood. I do not see how to step off. If I exit the walkways into the bushes, under the trees, or onto the sand—it doesn’t matter. I am still on their island.

we can’t change the past, so why dwell on it?”

The idea is that we can be forgiven for terrible things we do as children. That we can be redeemed, given the chance to start again.

Guys like him go to prison or run the country, and in neither case do they become anything more than rapists who fancy themselves rogues.

I’m going to live with the sadness and the shame, and actually feel them or whatever, and somehow not hate and punish myself so much. I’m going to just go on, one day and then another day.”

“No way out but through.”

That wasn’t easy, either. But she tried.