Magic for Liars

This time was going to be different. This time was going to be better. This time, I was going to be enough.

People didn't stick because I was made of fucking Teflon. I'd always told myself that it was better that way, that being alone was easier. That I wasn't a coward for easing my way out of friendships before they could really start.

Sometimes it feels like I’m in a staring contest with failure, and if I blink, I’ll die.

I tried not to feel temporary. Just for a few seconds.

In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother's last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.

Affirmation and illusion, bound up tighter than two snakes in the same egg.

Even after everything--even with everything that was still between us, that would probably always be between us--she was my sister. I was born reaching for her.

When someone thinks they are getting away with something, they're easier to manipulate. They stop looking closely at the things that might make it feel like their lie is unraveling, and they reveal things they didn't mean to.

The thing about me is, I let things go. I let people go. I don’t know how to hang on to them—I try, but I hold too tight or not tight enough or something in between and they go. They always go.

Truth matters. Truth has always been the thing I'm after, the most important thing. But sometimes, to get to the truth, detours through fiction are necessary. That's the job.

If you need to hurry...you’re already too late.

A twenty-five-cent word sprang unbidden into my mind: “noctilucent.” The word described the glow of a cat’s eyes at night, but it also seemed right for the woman in the photograph. She was a moonbeam turned flesh, pale with white-blond hair and wide-set light green eyes. Beautiful was not an appropriate word; she looked otherworldly. She looked impossible.

the bags under my eyes were definitely well past the carry-on limit

He was short, but he sprawled his legs out like a giraffe at a watering hole. I had an immediate fantasy of shoving him aside on the train so I could sit.

Being brave means holding your fear in one hand and your responsibility in the other

Tabitha stuck a finger into her cocktail, turning the drink an offensively bright shade of pink. “What’d you just do?” I asked around a mouthful of half-popped popcorn kernels. “I turned it pink,” she said. “Why?” She shrugged. “So it’ll be pink.

It was a feeling like nostalgia, but for something I’d never done. Something I never had.

It’s a lot like sticking your hand into a black box that may or may not have cobras in it.” I blinked. “That’s the most coherent explanation of magic I’ve ever heard.

All that’s gold does not glitter.” It seemed like the kind of thing that a kid would think was super-deep, would want to get tattooed on themselves.

I’ve never been good at recognizing what moments are important. What things I should hang on to while I’ve got them.

BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT, I’d made my way through half a bottle of wine and opened all of the star-shaped notes. I took a photo of each one as soon as I opened it, but, fortunately, none of them dissolved the way that first one had. Apparently these were made to last.

He has choices. He chooses to tell the first lie, and then he chooses to tell every other lie that comes after that.

…if this part of my life could be different from all the other parts where I was only ever almost enough.

would have been knocked flat by the intensity in those eyes. Adult-Ivy knew he was doing it on purpose, that he was thinking to himself blazing stare,

you need to hurry, her oft-repeated saying went, you’re already too late.

The thought "you probably shouldn’t tell her about this" wandered through my mind and smashed into "you’re pretty drunk" and "fuck it". Only fuck it survived the collision