Lauren DeStefano

“We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become.”

“I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.”

“He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look." It's an astounding word. It's a gift.”

“I don't know if it was love or an illusion. I don't know if there's ever a way to be certain.”

“Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.”

“Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.”

“I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.”

“It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.”

“She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.”

“It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.”

“The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They'll be planted and they'll grow into exactly what they're meant to be.”

“Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.”

“Cecily peers at the murky grey liquid and frowns at a cube of meat that's floating against the rim. "What was this in a past life?" she asks."Pigeons and a field rabbit," Reed says. "Hunted them down myself.""He's an excellent shot," Linden says."Can you eat pigeons, though?" Cecily falls back into her chair, looking a mix of disgusted and curious."You can eat just about anything," Reed says, dumping a ladleful into her bowl.”

“There's not enough room for the three of us.”

“He needs to grieve," I tell her. "He'll come find us when he's ready.""Rose is never going to be dead," she says, too disheartened to sound bitter.”

“I wanted to be rid of him," he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. "But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can't think I would have left you like that.""Look what it got you," I say."Tea in bed and you here in front of me," he says. "It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.”

“Someday I'll tell you all of it," I say."I'd like that," he says."No," I say. "I promise you won't.”

“I nod like I'm not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of coloured lights. We are nothing to each other.”

“My uncle used to let me pretend they were bricks," Linden says, startling me. He eases a thick hardcover from the shelf, hefts it in either hand, and then places it back. "I like to build houses out of them. They never came out exactly like I'd planned, but that's good. It taught me that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes."For some reason I'm finding it difficult to meet his eyes. I nod at one of the lower shelves and say, "Maybe it's because in your mind you don't have to worry about building materials. So you're not as limited.""That's astute," he says. He pauses. "You've always been astute about things.”

“And about a thousand other things," he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that words are not sufficient tools for him to build what's going on in his head as he stands before me.”

“Sometimes we don't know how afraid we are until we've reached a strange door and we don't know what will be on the other side.”

“I rip my handout of hers, and I want to back away. I want to get as far from her as I can, but for some reason I can't move from this spot."What else did you tell him?”

“We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.”

“There’s a limit to how much living can be done in a life without freedom.”

“It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.”

“He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.”

“She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.”

“Linden just wants to protect her, is what I want to say. She's all he has. I left him. I'm at arms reach, but I've left him.”

“There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.”

“This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.”

“It’s a world worth fighting for. Set fire to the broken pieces; start anew.”

“I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.”

“The months fall to shards at my feet.”

“When I call his name, it’s a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I’m standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand.I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can’t feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames.I can only see his face—his bewildered, beautifully familiar face.”

“We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.”

“She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean,” Madame says.”

“A feeling can't kill you.”

“I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.”

“I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”

“There’s this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.In death Rose became Linden’s parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs.”

“It feels as though we’re going in slow motion. I think we’ll never get away. But eventually the Ferris wheel is far enough away that it could be a moving constellation.”

“Bright spots move around him like someone shook the stars from a blanket and they all went flying.”

“Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination.”

“I wipe at her cheeks with the cuff of my green sweater because it’s the softest thing I can think of. It catches her tears without absorbing them, and they hang between the fibers like stars.”

“I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.”

“He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that's splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.”

“She strokes my cheeks with the side of her hand – a repetitive, wispy motion. Like little ghost kisses.”

“I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn't trust it with my secrets.”

“He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows.”

“We'll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we're young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We'll grow until we're braver. We'll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it's time to stop.”