Just Like Home

He tried to build us strong and steady and whole. But he didn’t keep us safe. He didn’t know how to shelter us from all the hurt that was waiting, because he thought that hurt was the shape of love.

Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them.

Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind.

it’s easy to love a simple thing.

This is the story of monsters and what they do to those who love them, those who fear them, and those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, from a different perspective, those who are in the right place at the right time. Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind. This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever loved a monster.

Many of us spend our lives searching for something too big to truly name, something that is often (inadequately) summarized as ‘unconditional love.

Vera was hungry for the strange new tenderness that had risen up in her mother, but she was afraid of it, too.

I hear you in the night sometimes, you know. Pacing around, trying to get away from whatever it is that won't let you rest.

She was too alone to be afraid.

Boys are just like girls, in almost every way. But men … men are demons, Vee.

The things she wanted were never within reach. Her father’s knowledge and her mother’s love, friendship and romance and a decent job that would stick, the thing beneath her bed and the thing that clung to the underside of her brain like a spider. She could not summon any of it.

I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them. There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.” At this, so fast Vera almost didn’t catch it, Daphne’s eyes flicked for just a moment to James Duvall. “And then there’s the thick, true, smothering hate we have for those we know best.

As if it's Vera's fault that no one pays attention to the sounds of her life.

She needed a moment alone that didn't feel like a punishment.

Vera doesn't move, not a single muscle. This is the side of her mother she so rarely gets to see, the side she so deeply longs for. There is the most softness and allowance here that Vera ever gets to see. This kindness, this interest. Vera wants to lean toward it like a flower turning toward sunlight. She wants to eat it.

Heat flared in Vera's chest, because it wasn't time or circumstance that had pulled them apart. Old fury warred with a deep and profound hunger to hear these words, to hear her mother telling her that she was wanted, that she'd always been wanted, and Vera pressed her palm to her mouth to keep from gasping at the pain of those two emotions meeting each other.

She'd learned to stop thinking of her mother as a person a long time ago, back when it still hurt to want Daphne to love her. Forgetting that her mother was human had been necessary. It had been the only way to survive the years when she still lived with a mother who looked at her daughter as if she were black mold blooming across the kitchen counter. It had been the only way to get through the years after that, when Vera was all alone in a world where someone always seemed to find out who she really was. But now, she had to think of her mother as a person. As a person who needed things. As a person who was sick and deserved care and dignity.

this little man with his soft skin and red blood and pitiful rage, couldn’t stop her.

girl and then a young woman and now a woman—just a woman, without ‘young’ attached. Pale the way a person gets when they’re indoors all the time, and tired the way a person gets after they’ve lived too many lives.

This was how she’d always been. Practical, direct, unwilling to bow to the discomfort of others. Vera’s mother did what needed to be done, always, and she had no patience for squeamishness.

Vera felt the first pang of regret. She should have come home sooner. The daughter she’d always wanted to be would have come home sooner.

The house swallowed the sound immediately, because it was a house that knew how to stay quiet. Vera breathed in the windows-shut smell of the place where she’d been born. The place where she’d grown up. The place she’d abandoned. The place where her mother was going to die.

I hope there is never a moment in your life when the love of a monster feels like the only option you have.

You will not drive me away from this house. You will not be the last one here.

It’s all Vera can think about, the uncertainty and the cruelty of it, the way it doesn’t make any sense for Brandon to be acting the way that he is. And then, one day, she’s going into the girls’ bathroom and he’s coming out of the boys’ bathroom, and he doesn’t say anything to her at all. He looks at her, looks right at her, sees her for sure. No faking like he didn’t notice her or like he’s distracted by his lunch. He sees Vera and his eyes flash dark and furious. And then, without a word, he walks away.

she’d spent too much time screaming since coming home, too much time letting animal fear tenderize her in the night, and she would not do it again. She was standing in a room that was full of daylight, a room that belonged to her, in a house that had been built by her father’s hands for her breath and skin and laughter to fill, and she was goddamned if she was going to scream inside that house even one more time.

It had been a friendship born of proximity and convenience, pushed along by their mothers. Neither of them would have picked the other one for a best friend, given the choice. Still, that friendship had lasted for years. It had defined her childhood. She’d wondered as a kid if they’d date, get married, have children of their own, have a home. She’d wondered because he was the boy she knew best and that seemed like the likeliest path for the two of them, and because nobody had ever told her that not wanting to marry men at all was an option. But now, here she was. Brandon hadn’t turned out to factor into her adulthood at all.

She tried so hard not to think of him that way. It was a forbidden corridor in her memory. She was allowed to think of him as an abstract concept, as a tense conversation topic, as a subject to be avoided. She could think of him as the son of a woman she needed to dodge in public. She could even occasionally think of him as someone she missed. But she tried never to let herself think of him as a person who she’d spent time playing with, as a person she’d goaded into scaling the fence around the abandoned quarry so they could see if it was really filled with radioactive slime. She hadn’t thought of him as her friend, who she loved and hated and spent her afternoons chasing, in a long time,