Brenna Yovanoff

From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.

Once, my mother told a whole host of angels that she__ rather die than go back to a man she didn__ love.

The treachery of demons is nothing compared to the betrayal of an angel.

My father's answer was revenge-has always been revenge-and the outcome was just, but not better. Nothing is fixed.

Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussions. My nineteen detentions were for smart answers and missed homework. There is no equivalent punishment for making the world a stranger place.

Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts _ as much searing, monumental pain it causes me _ I have to exist.

Are you waiting for someone to come and get you?_ I whisper. I sound small and thirsty. He doesn__ answer. Instead, he bends his head and kisses me, just once, then let__ me go. When Connor would kiss Angelie in the halls last spring, he did it like he was trying to suck the chocolate off the outside of a Klondike bar. It could last for hours. This is more like seeing a star fall - thrilling and soundless and then over.

I just want that, the way I feel when you kiss me. Just having it makes all the bad things better.

What's wrong?" His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry.I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. "I kissed her.""And then you went into anaphylactic shock?"I closed my eyes and let the rain patter against my face through the open window "She has her tongue pierced.

What kind of people?"The dead kind. The still-walking-around kind. The reeking, stinking, rotting-from-the-inside-out kind. Toothy and grinning, nasty with the dark and the dust of abandoned strip mines. But none of that was the whole truth. They were more than that. - page 135

My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me. The boy is fragile, broken__roke himself__roke everything.I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was unlivable. He said it was unlovable, but I think he meant himself. I think he meant that loneliness is sometimes painful.I curl against him, tuck my head beneath his chin and listen to his heart. It says stay and wait. It says regret. He knows what it is to want love, a love so fierce you grow roots. I hear his heart say please. He went looking for angels and found me instead, girl of the sorrows, sad but not sorry. I waited for a sign, a star to fall. He reached for a knife and drew branches.

People make decisions, and maybe you don't always agree, but those choices are still their own.

I've never been impulsive. It's always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn't matter anymore.

He smiles an honest smile for the first time, and the difference is hard to describe but easy to recognize.

You're terribly selfish, you know. I've loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.

Did you ever think about boys?' I say, staring up into the dark. 'There wasn't room,' she whispers, and her voice is unbelievably sad. 'At first, after Connor, I was just waiting. I was going to get a new boyfriend soon- as soon as I was prettier or better, more perfect. But after a while there was no room for anything else. If I though about kissing or sex, I just started feeling ugly, too awful for anything good.

I'm not about love, but in this moment, I wish that I were.

You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.