All the Rage

You know all the ways you can kill a girl? God, there are so many.

I don't believe in forgiveness. I think if you hurt someone, it becomes part of you both. Each of you just has to live with it and the person you hurt gets to decide if they want to give you the chance to do it again. If they do and you're a good person, you won't make the same mistakes. Just whole new ones.

My dad used to say makeup was a shallow girl's sport, but it's not. It's armor.

Because teenage girls don't pray to God, they pray to each other. They clasp their hands over a keyboard and then they let it all out, a (stupid) girl's heart tucked into another girl's heart.

I wish I didn’t have a body, sometimes.

But just because something starts out sweet doesn’t mean it won’t push itself so far past anything you could call sweet anymore. And if it all starts like this, how do you see what’s coming?

Because maybe it would be better if we all got apologized to first. Maybe it would hurt less, expecting to be hurt.

There’s a miracle there, but there’s something so awful about it too, bringing someone into all this now, this world where a girl can’t even trust a drink that passes her lips. I can’t figure out the kind of heart it takes to do something like that.

It’s kind of like stumbling upon the scene of an accident. Once you’ve looked, you’re part of it. Especially if you walk away.

He was planning to rape me -" "Why would he ever -" "Because he knew he'd get away with it.

It’s something my body does without checking with my head first, like the obligation to be nice to him is greater than myself.

I want to shove the question down his throat until he chokes on it.

Everyone who knows her loves her. Except people hurt the people they love all the time.

Cell phones don’t run as fast as the mouths in this town.

Her eyes widen and she shoves me back and then there's a space between us, enough to paralyze me with all of the things I could do to her next. I could raise my hand and hit her in the face or bring my knee into her stomach, take a fistful of her hair and rip it out of her skull. You don't get to do this when you're a girl, so when the opportunity for violence finally presents itself, I want all of it at once.

He’s the boy who stopped and I’m the girl he stopped for and what happens to her, if he goes away?

It’s so hard not to enjoy this because how can you put something so golden, a girl who can barely open her eyes or her mouth—how can you put something like that in front of them and expect them to be better people?

There’s a girl out there everyone thinks is dead and maybe she is because you know all the ways there are to kill a girl? I do.

I don’t know why it’s the girls who always seem to have to take on that kind of burden.

They cry for her and twist their hands in a way they never would for me. This is what happens when a girl befalls a fate no one thinks she deserves.

It can’t be wrong to want to see someone because you like the person you are when you’re around them. That’s probably one of the best reasons you could have.

I make sure to tell her I love her because more and more, I’m thinking about the last things I say before I leave.

I pull my sheet up over my head and cover my body. Her body. I wish I didn’t have a body.

I glance at her and she looks soft, not vicious, but a lot of people in this town are a soft kind of vicious.

And it's not that she tells him it didn't happen, it's that by the time he asks, she no longer has a language of her own. But that's enough. It always is.

Penny Young is the most perfect girl you know and those kinds of girls, they’re put on this earth to break you. Peel back her skin and you can see her poison. Peel back mine, you can still see traces of where her poison’s been.

Helen Turner hates me and the way Helen Turner hates me feels like the worst kind of betrayal. A woman who doesn’t think about daughters she doesn’t have.

I want to burn a moment of helplessness into him so he can know a fraction of what I felt, what I feel, what’s followed me every moment since, so I You cover cover his her mouth mouth.

I press my hands against my face and split myself in two. Push away the side that’s the truth because that’s the side that wants to be angry at him for how wrong he is because of all the things he doesn’t know. I focus on the side I’ve shown to him. There’s so much missing, but it’s better that it’s missing. And as long as it’s missing, that makes everything he’s saying to me now—right.

The silence stretches between us. Words aren’t so easy to come by, after his admission. It takes him a while to dig some up.