[b]Celeste Ng
She understands. There is nowhere to go but on.[/b]
Unless of course she pulls the plug.
One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules… was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.
On the other hand [here] you either are or are not banned.
Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, “Show me again, show me another.” Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.
Lydia learns a lesson about the limitations of love.
It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?
On the other hand, where does one stop and the other begin. In other words, not unlike most things.
Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.
Remember what? Well, that is different for all of us.
He can guess, but he won’t ever know, not really. What it was like, what she was thinking, everything she’d never told him.
No getting around this, is there?