The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you’d trust a rock more than a cake.

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there’s something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.

Still, what a risk he’d taken. The woman was like an amateur car bomb: you never knew when she’d blow up or who she’d take down with her when she did.

I only knew about it because men talk. It’s amazing what they’ll tell you, especially if you’re covered with shiny green scales and they can’t see your real face. It must be like talking to a fish.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true.

Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

Something else had now happened, it seemed: Lucerne had cast off her paralyzing spell, the spell of Zeb. She’d stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense.

“Don’t you love him?” I said. Amanda said I was a romantic. She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.

But still frightened, because when might the whole problem — the whole thing — start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby — being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We’d rather have wings.

Maybe she was truly like that inside, and all the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges — that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she’d grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and raged, she’d been stuck in there.

I said maybe I was too sad for the job: didn’t they want a more upbeat personality in their girls? But Mordis smiled with his shiny black-ant eyes and said, as if he was patting me: “Ren. Ren. Everyone’s too sad for everything.”

I used to picture Jimmy looking at me, and thinking that it was really me he’d loved all along, not Wakulla Price or LyndaLee or any of the others, or even Amanda, and that I was dancing just for him. I do know how useless this was.

“May his Spirit go in peace,” she says out loud. Such as it is, the fuck-pig.