All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

Most days I was impossible. Like a unicorn.

When I reached her, she was a star, pulling me into her orbit

Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.

I wanted a fairy tale ending for Wavy, because if she could find happiness, there would be hope for me, too.

I love you. I love you all the way.

You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out.

I liked to play at tragedy, but she drank it out of her baby bottle.

Truth was she took care of him as much as he did her. There was a few times when he was younger that I thought to myself, One of these days, he ain’t gonna show up for work, ’cause he’ll be at home with a gun in his mouth. I had an uncle did that. Jesse Joe was a man with a deep streak of lonely, until Wavy came along.

You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.

Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire.

Girl that age ought not to have so many troubles, but she did. Looking at it that way, them two was about made for each other.

Sometimes waiting and being disappointed was good, to remind me he didn't belong to me. Nothing belonged to me.

That’s not the only thing love means. You just got your mind in the gutter.

From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

Summer had so many tricks. The nights lasted longer than the days, even though the angle of the Earth’s axis meant that was impossible. The night couldn’t be longer, but summer made it seem that way. Summer sneaked time for me, taking a minute from February, three minutes from English class in March, ten whole minutes from a boring Thursday in April. Summer stole time to give me another hour under the stars with Kellen.

I was moving forward into space, but i would never come home again

Nothing belongs to you. It didn’t matter that Grandma gave the cookbook to me. All Mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers.

That’s the problem with the Christmas story: most of the roles are for boys. The only girl is there because men can’t have babies.

I was lying on the tracks under a train I was in love with.

Now you know, okay? From here on out, only you. I promise.

I love you, Wavy. I love you." I said it until she relaxed. "Now put your ring back on.

After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.

Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less. If I lay very still in bed at night, I remembered how Grandma’s house smelled. The taste of mint ice cream on Kellen’s tongue. Donal jumping on the bed to wake me up.

That’s what church was to Wavy: a set of games she didn’t quite understand.

We didn't need to talk. We just laid there watching falling stars go streaking white through all that darkness.

That night I first saw you, I was going too fast. There I was rubbernecking at you and dumped the bike. Wrecked me up. I don’t want to wreck us up like that. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She

I’d been going along thinking I was Shakespeare, but I’d written myself out of the play.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.