--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
“I can’t remember what it’s like to eat without planning for it, charting the calories and the fat content and measuring my hips and thighs to see if I deserve it and usually deciding no, I don’t deserve it, so I bite my tongue until it bleeds and I wire my jaw shut with lies and excuses while a blind tapeworm wraps itself around my windpipe, snuffling and poking for a wet opening to my brain.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
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“You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught between worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson “We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest, blood dripping from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson “I can’t stop, but I can’t keep going,’ she told me. ‘Nothing works.’ I totally supported her. I looked up the names of docs and clinics. I e-mailed her recovery Web sites. And I sabotaged every step. I told her how strong she was and how healthy she was going to be and how proud I was of her and I dropped in how many calories I ate that day, the magic number on the scale, the number of inches around my thighs. We went to the mall and I made sure we used the same dressing room so she could see my skeleton shine in the florescent blue light.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson “This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson “You don’t understand, my headvoice answers. Too bad she can’t hear it. My throat squeezes shut, as if two hands of black fingernails are clamped on my windpipe. I have worked so hard to forget every second of that stupid party, and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can’t tell them what really happened. I can’t even look at that part myself.”
--Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson “I am a good actor. I have a whole range of smiles. I use the shy, look-up-through-the-bangs smile for staff members, and the crinkley-eye smile with a quick shake of my head if a teacher asks me for an answer. If my parents want to know how school went, I flash my eyebrows upward and shrug my shoulders. When people point at me or whisper as I walk past, I wave to imaginary friends down the hall and hurry to meet them. If I drop out of high school, I could be a mime.”
--Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson “IT found me again. I thought I could ignore IT. There are four hundred other freshman in here, two hundred female. Plus all the other grades. But he whispers to me. I can smell him over the noise of the metal shop and I drop my poster and the masking tape and I want to throw up and I can smell him and I run and he remembers and he knows. He whispers in my ear.”
--Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson |