Persephone (Into Shadow, #2)

by Lev Grossman

My head hurt, one of those Advil-proof, hot-coal-in-the-skull headaches.

For some people bad things happening brings them together. We were the other kind of people.

It was like I’d become a ghost without having to go through the messy intermediate step of actually dying.

Now I was in tenth grade, and Lindsay was the only one of my friends who’d stuck around. I guess she believed in ghosts.

I took all that stuff and put it in what I thought of as a mental disposal facility. I could picture it quite vividly: it was gray and metal and industrial looking, roughly riveted together, with the words CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE stenciled on it in red. It was a toxic emotional waste storage site. Its capacity was infinite.

I just wanted to be somebody else, I didn’t care who. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I was drowning in myself.

Honestly I could not have explained why I cared so much, but it was like someone had stuck a blunt sword right through my chest and was prying my ribs apart and crushing my heart. Even this, even this I could not have. But of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I couldn’t believe I’d thought I could pass for an actual person. More than anything at that moment I wished my father were here, just sitting there watching cartoons with me. Being with him was the last time I could remember when it took no actual effort for me to believe that I was a real person.

I felt like I was Anne of Green Gables, and I was at long last going to shank Gilbert Blythe’s punk ass and leave him for dead.

There was so much you didn’t get to choose. The hard way was going to be very hard. It would be a long, long time before I felt safe and warm again. But I would be free, and I would be myself. Show me those fucking pomegranate seeds, I thought. Come on. I’ll eat every last one of them.