Extraits

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord– tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential– and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. _That_ is the difference between a sister and a friend.”

A lot was written about romantic love, Avery thought, about the profundity of that embrace. But this, too, was deserving of rapture, of song. Before she ever knew a lover's body, she knew her sister', could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good.

All Avery wanted was someone to tell her what to do. She wished her mother could give her the answers, but of course she couldn't.

Your father doesn't live here, she'd reassured her gently. You won't need to escape. But Avery's father lived inside of Avery, the one home she could never leave.

Lucky and Avery couldn't see it, but they were too similar. Att their worst, they were selfish, stubborn, and self-destructive.

Lucky squirmed. All her life she'd hated compliments. Since other women often resented her on sight, she did her best to make herself nonthreatening. This was usually by not saying much or finding a way to make fun of herself.

Bonnie exhaled with relief. She hated that Avery was the one who always had to fix everything in their family and relieved by it in equal measure.

And for what little maternal advice and encouragement they needed, they had Avery.

What kind of alcoholic keeps his job all those years ? Theirs, it turned out.

In her whole life, she'd probably only met a handful of people who had good dads. All of them were weird. Kids who grew up with loving fathers had the same starry-eyed softness as kids raised in places like Malibu, those homes of eternal sunshine. They never had to toughen up. Lucky had this theory that having a bad dad was like growing up in a place with a long, rough winter. It hardens you. It also prepares you for reality, which is that summer is a season, not a lifestyle, and most men will hurt you if they get the chance. Or maybe it was only the people who grew up with bad dads who believed that.