The Truth About Alice

There is one thing I've learned about people: they don't get that mean and nasty overnight. It's not human nature. But if you give people enough time, eventually they'll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world.

How much did it hurt? It was like a million paper cuts on my heart.

It’s like when we read The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I would have been a Nazi back then because I wouldn’t have had the guts to be anything else. Because I would have been too scared to not go along with the majority. Like, I would have been a passive sort of Nazi, but I still would have been a Nazi. I never said anything out loud, of course, but I remember reading that book in Ms. Peterson’s class and everyone was all, “Oh, I would’ve helped Anne. I would have rebelled. I don’t understand how people could have allowed this to happen, blah blah blah.” I mean,

It’s like when we read The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I would have been a Nazi back then because I wouldn’t have had the guts to be anything else. I know that everyone wants to believe they would have been the brave one and they would have been the one to hide Anne in their attic and they would have killed Hitler with their own bare hands. But clearly if everybody thinks that way and in reality only a few people actually did it way back then, doesn’t that just make me the honest one?

I really can't handle talking about this for too long because it hurts too much, but I want to say that there is one thing I've learned about people they don't get that mean and nasty overnight. It's not human nature. If you give people enough time, eventually they'll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world.

I’ve missed you, too,” I say. “And I’ve missed your vocabulary.” “Tremendously?” he says, smiling.

You know how there’s this whole world that exists only to teenagers, and adults never know what’s going on there?

There are some things, like your eighth grade boyfriend kissing some other girl at a middle school dance, that are easy to forgive. And there are some things that are just unforgivable.

Alice smiled her wide smile. The crooked incisor smile.

Brandon was like a God in Healy, and I guess I was like God's best friend.

I do want to say that there is one thing I’ve learned about people: they don’t get that mean and nasty overnight. It’s not human nature. But if you give people enough time, eventually they’ll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world.

I see no need in taking part in forced adolescent social rituals that would do nothing but stir up emotions of dread for all involved.

That was back when all of us were students at Jefferson Elementary, and our quirks and strange rough edges hadn't fully formed yet

If you give people enough time, eventually they’ll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world.

Her letters were bubbly and girlish. Her handwriting made her seem happier than she actually was.

But if you give people enough time, eventually they’ll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world. *

Even the gods themselves must have eventually gotten used to being around Aphrodite.

Not Fantasy Alice, but the living, breathing, talking, walking, actual Alice who holds her breath near cemeteries and eats grilled cheese sandwiches and has managed to survive complete and utter banishment from everyone she ever regarded as a friend and still come to school every single day.

Lastly, unlike my fellow citizens, I have the ability to recognize that Healy is simply an extremely small place in the middle of a very large place called the United States, and that the United States is itself also just a small place in the middle of an even larger place called the world, and that makes much of what is discussed in and around Healy inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

I don't look out onto the sea of faces and wish I wasn't alone. I simply acknowledge the sea exists...