nothing to see here | kevin wilson
I haven’t laughed this hard at a book since Hitchhiker’s Guide. I loved this so, so much.
notes:
I had spent my childhood gritting my teeth and smashing everything to bits in the name of excellence.
But you’re going from shit to gold, and it’s going to be real tough to handle that. I hope you make it.”
Even in flip-flops, she was model tall, and I could tell that the soles of her feet would be so fucking soft.
“I want to be powerful. I want to be the person who makes big things happen, where people owe me so many favors that they can never pay me back. I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.” She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.
She had to tamp down her weirdness in public because it scared people when beautiful people didn’t act a certain way, made themselves ugly.
but there were girls like me who just really liked being badasses all over weaker people.
I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me.
Because Madison was brilliant and because she had that slightly skewed way of saying things in a straightforward manner that broke you in half,
I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.
A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.
If any aspect of his appearance had been off by even a few degrees, he would have seemed evil. But he had the ratio perfect.
I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.
Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.
These kids were like aliens, like they’d been given a really incomplete book about humans and were trying to remember every detail.
We tried dribbling while walking around, which is harder than it seems. Doing two things at once for the first time, no matter how simple it looks, requires your body to adjust, to find the instinctual rhythm that makes it work. And the kids, Jesus, they were not good.
Roland looked like an intern at a bank, but Bessie looked like a girl at her mom’s third wedding.
I knew how she was feeling, the need to have Madison look at you, direct that sunlight your way.
If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.
I prayed this was not the doctor.
“I’m the doctor!” he said, waving to the children.
This was my life, a good part of it, hating other people and then hating myself for not being better than them.
It broke my heart, and I knew that a good part of my life had been spent waiting for it to break so I could get it over with.
They cut back to the studio, where a man in tweed looked like he’d eaten poison.
The kids were happy. They had added another to their numbers. They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.
“Will you take care of some other kids?” Roland asked.
“Probably not,” I said. “I’d probably hate them after being with you guys. They’d be so boring.”
It made me smile. I remembered those games when you would just ride this wave, when it felt like all you had to do was keep your feet under you and you couldn’t miss. If you thought about it, tried to figure out why it was happening, it would leave you, and you could feel it when you put up your next shot. It was gone. So you put your head down, ran down the court, stayed on your man, and just waited until it came back to you. And you promised yourself that you wouldn’t lose it again, that you’d hold on to it this time.
I knew there would come a time when I had to give them back. And, god, they would hate me. For their entire lives. More than their mother. More than Jasper, even. They’d hate me because I’d made them think that I could do it.
There are a lot of nice things about being rich, but one of the best is that you can say almost anything, and if you do it with confidence, without blinking, people put a lot of effort into believing you.”
janet change 