The Girls Who Grew Big

“But maybe all the things I loved most about my momma were easiest to remember when all I wanted to do was to hug her, when the dream of an intact family was more enchanting than the truth of it all. And I wanted the lie. I wanted the easy story without its cold end.”

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong. So if you’re asking me if I think you’d be prettier if you was skinny as a reed, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t much care if you’re skinny or pretty, and don’t you start thinking they’re the same thing, but I sure as hell am always gonna think you prettiest when you’re breathing, when you’re fed and housed and happy.”

“You remember how much safer it is to not want nothing at all.”

“We rotate, ripple, revolve, so you can’t know one of us without knowing all of us, love one of us without loving the metal scrape of the truck we found, gave, claimed life inside.”

“And if you think I don’t make sense with all of them just ’cause I’m white, you wouldn’t believe what happens when a girl these days gets knocked up. Suddenly, it’s the most important thing about you. Suddenly, you don’t have green eyes or a two-bedroom shack on Willow Street or straight A’s in Biology. You are nothing but a young mother.”

“But that was not how you loved a child. That was how you let a child love you.”

“Here’s the thing about killer whales: contrary to popular belief, they won’t kill you and they’re not even whales. That’s what happens to someone when the world decides something about you, grabs hold and morphs you into an illusion of yourself: suddenly even your name isn’t your own.”

“Said this wasn’t no town where you could just be out here mixing with the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people. Funny, I thought. It was the only time in my life I’d ever heard Pawpaw talk about us like we were the right kind of people.”

“A pool made you feel invincible, but an ocean did the opposite. It reminded you what a fragile thing you were, how every cell that made you up was nothing in comparison to the waves that could take you down as quickly as a bullet shot through your softest skin.”

“If you’re not your mother’s only child, you know there’s not nobody in the world that can understand the dirt you fought to grow from like your brother.”

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong.”

“But now? I want different now. You can't predict what's gonna happen, but you can take a good look at yourself and be honest about who you are and what you're willing to give for what you want.”

“I knew what I felt wasn’t distinctly human, but some days I thought it’d be better to be some other kind of critter so even if the regret still spiked a hole through me, I prob’ly wouldn’t remember it an hour later. Like those rats in the maze when their little brains blessed them with forgetting.”

“I was supposed to be golden.”

“For some of us, the terror is in the waiting. For others, it is in the dispossession of our own skin, how we turn raw and violet and breathless, our flesh gone translucent. We see the child that is growing inside us and we are not sure if we have enough in us to love it, to raise it. This foreign thing, this creature that has altered the axle of ourselves.”

“Not every girl could say that and for a moment all my worries became masked with the jitters of a simmering desire and the hope that I could have what every girl wanted: someone to love her, protect her, clean her vomit out of the pool and not make her feel bad about it for even a moment.”

“They say that in Florida, you go north and you get south. The Panhandle being the most south you could get in the Sunshine State.”

“This is how all family’s created. Confession. A yearning to release. Somewhere to place your shame and have it wrapped up, coddled, cradled like an infant who don’t have words yet to explain all the ways the world haunts them.”

“Like always, Tooth snapped my hope in two and I remembered who he was.”

“Noni understood I wasn’t going to confess to her, seemed to respect that and headed back toward the stairs, but before she climbed them, she turned to me and said, “I’m not embarrassed of you, Adela. For the longest time, I thought you and your daddy was embarrassed of me. Still do.”

“But that was before I told anybody, before I started to feel suffocated beneath a love I couldn’t return.”

“He apologized, and I was fragile enough to not care whether he meant it.”

“All these old folks only cared about race, but not me. I cared about people and animals and things more innate than color. It was primitive, seeing things all black and white. I prided myself on being evolved.”

“It’s funny, making the same mistake twice.”

“I knew what it was to be our parents’ child.”

“Don't we all deserve to have a second chance at choosing the thing that'll choose us back.”

“The Girls knew how to run wild and, at first, I, like most of this town, feared them. Children mothering children and never apologizing for it, the country’s shame clear as the gloss of the babies’ eyes staring up as they suckled on their mothers’ breasts. I feared the Girls until the day I realized I was becoming one of them, that every week my skin was stretching me closer to the way they let loose. The pregnancy showed itself eventually and the Girls rubbed off on me like sand on wet feet, so I could not be rid of them.”

“a love that began and ended the way oceans did: nowhere and everywhere, a thrashing constant.”

“Smart girls aren’t supposed to get in trouble.”