But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now e...
This one time in Year Eight we had to write on butcher’s paper how we’d like people to see us. Remember ours? We were like, ‘We don’t want people to see us as leaders or heroes or anything out of the ordinary. We just want them to see us as o...
When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body. Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way t...
Ever see something in a store that you gotta have? How about those rainbow suspenders you wore only once? Prevent the "wish-I-hadn't"s by asking yourself these questions: *Will I use it or wear it often? *Will I use it or wear it a couple months from...
What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the...
It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard. ‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it...
One day, an unusually exciting event interrupted the rhythm of our regular middle-class teenage lives. A Russian woman, the mother of a girl in our class, was run over by a New York City bound train right in the center of town. Our classmate left sch...
I bet you think fellas are the ones to remember a girl -- don't you?" He shook his head hurriedly, that he'd always thought that. "Fellas have all the fun 'n she just sees one right after another, so it seems like HE'D remember her, better 'n SHE'D r...
You haven't any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from th...
You can’t say ‘Oh my stars.’ ‘Oh my stars’ is not a thing, and it makes no sense. The whole point of that saying is that you’re calling out to someone for help, and stars are not ‘someone,’ and certainly not capable of helping.” The...
On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a...
We live in an adolescent society, Neverland, where never growing up seems more the norm than the exception. Little boys wearing expensive suits and adult bodies should not be allowed to run big corporations. They shouldn’t be allowed to run governm...
I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anast...
I've been wanting to do that for a very long time," I growled Victor smiled through the pain and the blood. "Of course you have. I used to think Belikov was the savage one, but it's really you, isn't it? You're the animal with no control, no higher r...
That night she looked like the most beautiful girl I’d seen outside a sticky nudie magazine. She had a glow about her, like a pink neon shop sign on the outskirts of Orafouraville that says “Rose is For Sale.” Prostitution or a grammatically in...
He is really cute,” I admitted, curious as to how many girls like me this guy had met. He shook his head in amusement as he worked on his painting. “Of course. I guess he’d have to be for you to risk so much, huh? Alchemists never fall for the ...
With us, there were always too many false starts. I believe that what's meant to be usually has a way of working out... and with us, it never did. Call it timing, call it fate, call it what you want. It is what it is. Sometimes in the end, the girl d...
Well, there is rough old Albert, as ornery as any big brother a girl could have, putting his arm around Savannah and cooing to her like a repenting hound dog, and promising her she is not common nor shameful. I watched all this and thought you just n...
She was left to beg for mercy only to burn in torment again the next day. She was a weed struggling through cracks of concrete, unwanted, undesired, crushed and abused under trampling feet. She would never see the sun. She would never be free. She wo...
Hardy’s poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in ‘Snow in the Suburbs’, which allows the eye to follow the cascad...
For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow....
