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She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen. We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the colla...more

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This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

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So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had ...more

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But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.

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There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to...more

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I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?

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Falling in love... how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy...more

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And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.