Extraits

“Do you like Shakespeare?” he asks me.

An odd segue.

I shake my head. “All I know about him is that he stole my name and spelled it wrong.”

He looks away.

And he smiles.

It’s the kind of smile that makes me forget how to do everything but blink and blink and I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I don’t know why I can’t convince my eyes to find something else to focus on.

I don’t know why my heart is losing its mind.

He touches my notebook like he’s not even aware he’s doing it. His fingers run the length of the cover once, twice, before he registers where my eyes have gone and he stops.

“You wrote these words?” He touches the notebook again. “Every single one?”

I nod.

He says, “Juliette.”

I stop breathing.

He says, “I would like that very much. To be your friend,” he says. “I’d like that.”

What a lie appearances can be.

What a terrible, terrible lie.

“You can go to hell,” Adam shouts at Warner.

“Just because I’m going to hell,” Warner says, “doesn’t mean you’ll ever deserve her.”

“You’re so lovely when you’re blushing,” Warner says to me.

He takes a deep breath. Looks down. Whispers, “I am so tired, love. I’m so very, very tired.”

Men with guns have never put me at ease no matter how many times they promised they were killing for good reason.

Hope can make people do terrible things.

I wonder at my inability to be so free with words and feelings. I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through.

Stuffed so full of people places things and ideas that I don’t know how to break out of my own brain. How to start a conversation.

How many times, I hear a voice whisper in my head, how many times will you apologize for who you are?