My favorite passages so far:
My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world. Of course, every time she said it, “the world” meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding on to was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again.
I was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of Bubble Wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me—in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus—if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal.
I tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth.
And:
Lucy was miles away from anyone who would know this about her, but there was nothing that could stun her into compliance quite like a beautiful girl wielding a certain, effortless competence. She had, rather famously, fallen for her ex after listening to her order a sandwich.
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