The Pact

I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I'm pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. [...] The thing is, they're both you.

I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home? What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

She was all the things I wasn't. And i was all the things she wasn't. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been. Her hand, it fit mine.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.

No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it's a miracle.

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

The mind is a remarcable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?

That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

No," he said calmly, filled with purpose. he took her arms lightly in his hands and shook her. "I am not giving you up." Emily looked at him, and for just a moment he could read her thoughts. Melanie use to say they were like twins, with their own secret, silent language. in that instant, Chris felt her fear and her resignation, and the knotty pain of coming up against a brick wall again and again. She glanced away, and he could breathe again. "The thing is, Chris" Emily said, "it's not your choice.

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related.

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

Any highway . . . they all take you to the same place, don't they?

Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one’s advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.

You always knew after shitty things happened, who your friends really were.

And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it

She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.

What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?

The gun slipped on Emily's temple, and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

Just 'cause you can't see me don't mean I gone away.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.