Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.
Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.
I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.
That’s the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours–
I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.
You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.
I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.
It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel they’ve been shortchanged.
I suppose I’m in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I’d have walked out by now.
But you don’t know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.
I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.
…I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them…
There was a flicker of something in Greta’s look. I couldn’t tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.
…there’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special, even though you know you’re not.
Then, who is Matilda?’ I asked.Toby tilted his cup and poked at the slush with his straw. ‘I suppose Matilda’s the girl who felt like home.
I dream about people who don’t need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.
It’s hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.
That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.
I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider’s web. That’s because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way she says things.
My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.