Laurie Halse Anderson - Wintergirls (2009)

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A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I'm the girl who trips on the dance floor and can't find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Dead girl walking the boys say in the halls. Tell us your secrets the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.

Laurie Halse Anderson
He doesn't see my breasts or my waist or my hips. He only sees the nightmare.

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, when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don't want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut my heart out or take every pill that was ever made.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For awhile. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's to late because you are maintaining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop.

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.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I knew how much it hurt to be the daughter of people who can't see you, not even if you are standing in front of them stomping your feet.

Laurie Halse Anderson
You hurt her by starving yourself, you hurt her with your lies, and by fighting everybody who tries to help you. Emma can only sleep a couple of hours a night now. She's haunted by nightmares of monsters that eat our whole family. They eat us slowly, she says, so we can feel their sharp teeth.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am. She nods her head slowly. „What do you think you'd look like? Smaller, for a start.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Eating plain toast will detonate her. "I'll have some honey." When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer of it and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don't notice her pretending.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I can't tell anymore when I'm asleep and when I'm awake, or which is worse.

Laurie Halse Anderson
The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn't make her skinny, it made her cry.

Laurie Halse Anderson
If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.

Laurie Halse Anderson
For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.

Laurie Halse Anderson
I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Used to be that my whole body was my canvas-hot cuts licking my ribs, ladder rungs climbing my arms, thick milkweed stalks shooting up my thighs....

Laurie Halse Anderson
Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.

Laurie Halse Anderson
Two days later, two days before Christmas, I am judged fat and sane enough to be kicked out of the hospital. The plan to send me straight back to New Seasons won't work. There is no room at the inn for a leather Lia-skin plumped full of messy things. Not yet. The director promises Dr. Marrigan he'll have a bed for me next week. I'm stable enough to go home until then. They all say I'm stable.

Laurie Halse Anderson