I packed a few books for our multi-day roadtrip back to AZ, including Everything I Never Told You (different than I thought it was going to be, but I liked it) and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (I can’t even bring myself to finish it) but the best of the lot was The Girls by Emma Cline.
Some of my favourites:
“I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
“So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play.”
“How I loved to wring myself out that way, stoking my feelings until they were unbearable. I wanted all of life to feel that frantic and pressured with portent, so even colors and weather and tastes would be more saturated.”
“When I was nine, I’d broken my wrist falling from a swing. The shocking crack, the blackout pain. But even then, even with my wrist swelling with a cuff of trapped blood, I insisted I was fine, that it was nothing, and my parents believed me right up until the doctor showed them the X-ray, the bones snapped clean.”
“I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgement, I thought, of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to ‘make it home safe.'”
