Aimee (Book It Forward) > Recent Status Updates

You don’t keep your sanity among the chaos of a family of boys without a good sense of order

Motherly love was no sentimental thing. It was irrefutable and unsparing, a squad of riot police mindlessly clubbing the protester, no matter how righteous her cause.

Oliver wishes he would have spoken to Hector that night. He says to himself “You night have saved yourself, your town, your family if only you had rolled down your window and asked him a question or two.

“You couldn’t have known then how your history and this mans history were already entwined. You could not have known that the way he would escape his hell would be the same way yours would begin.

Oliver sees Hector Espina while waiting for Rebekkah (actually kind of stalking her) in his car. Hector goes up to Rebekkahs house and pounds at the door. No one answers but he sees Oliver in his car as he is leaving.

Why does Rebekkah tell Oliver she doesn’t like him like that after kissing him and talking with him everyday for weeks? She abruptly stops speaking with him and he then notices a bruise on her leg. Who is beating her?

Ma leaves a message for Charlie that the Doctors see Oliver in there now. Charlie leaves Edwina with Rebekkah

The silence Oliver loved about Rebekkah Charlie had learned was like a godlike force, in which she could take infinite forms.

Poor Charlie had so many questions after Oliver was shot. Would Ma ever learn to think of a future beyond the end of each day? Would he forever wake to his brothers absence with the nightmarish sensation that somehow he had woken without all of his limbs?

The one thing Charlie could recognize-in the vibration of Oliver’s eyes, the ruh ruh sounds Oliver’s throat made, the endless swatting of Oliver’s arms- was life. Perhaps with its back to a dark corner, perhaps at the bottom of a deep crevasse, but still life, battling its way for light.

Charlie is flailing in NYC. $5k Behind On tent, not completing the book he already been paid an advance on, single and living in a dumpy apartment with his dying pug.

The Loving Family Curse Charlie called it, this damning belief that any place was far preferable to the present one.

Pa telling Charlie about NYC. That city, he said, is no place for kids. But someday, when you are all grown up, you should run off for it the first chance you get. No place for kids, but believe your pa when he tells you that our little town is no place for grown ups.

Oliver and Rebekkah kiss!!

Oliver to his mom “You don’t know that my body is separate from yours, he told her.” Your mother then reached once more for that pulsating mass on your forehead (a zit she wanted to pop). “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever told me,” she said.

The sight of Oliver’s zits seemed to break his moms heart, proof that he was growing older, leaving further behind the best moment of her life, when you needed her entirely.

Oliver is in love with Rebekkah. She meets him every morning before school and they talk. She doesn’t talk much more to him during the school day. Oliver says he read that “if two people maintain eye contact for six unblinking seconds it means they want sex or a fight. Rebekkah maintains eye contact at the football game for 9 seconds.

His Astronomy presidency “had become your sturdiest notion of familial love: the effort required of you to maintain a loved ones necessary illusion. “

Oliver is a sweet kid. He wanted to quit the Young Astronomers Club but he knew it would break his Dad’s heart. “Pa had already suffered too many heartbreaks, ruined dreams, lousy canvases for you to bear...”

Oliver seems to be aware of all his visitors over the years.

Oliver! A shot across the void.

Rebekkah disappeared after the shooting.

On that morning, Oliver had been lost in his body for 3,537 days.

Eve says Oliver’s body has been colonized by machines.

A mother didn’t deliberately pick favorites, but she couldn’t help it if one child was more her than the other

The doctors don’t know Oliver like his mother does. She has to fight for him. The boy who always insisted everyone stop and look at the sunset no matter how plain.

Eve feels like if she doesn’t stand watch Oliver will skip away from her.

Eve says Crockett State Assisted Care Facility was a placd where people in a particular predicament could displace the burden of their guilt. It allowed families to commit the cowards forms of patricide, matricide, fratricide: to cede the care of your loved ones, to tell yourself you had done everything you could and then let some infection accomplish the act they didn’t have the courage to commit.

Eve gets mad at Jed for joking around before Oliver’s test and Jed gets furious. Says she doesn’t get to tell him how to deal with all this. They tell each other to screw themselves. Eve says she has spent four hours a day, six days a week beside bed four.

Funny jokes about hipsters.