Kristen Roupenian Quotes

Kids are real resilient," says Babs, and all the women bob their heads. Bullshit, Marla thinks. Maybe some kids are resilient. But are all of them? Is Tilly? Resilience - the ability to brush off pain - is something Marla herself has only fitfully and imperfectly grown into, over time. The petty miseries of her own early childhood are some of her most vivid memories, even now.

. . . she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marveled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who'd just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.

What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she's summoned Taylor's dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.

She can feel it scratching at her, her anger, wedged in the space where the two halves of her rib cage meet.

She'd been on the hunt for some badass dude who'd go down with her into whatever dark place she was trapped in, but instead she'd ended up with this lame-ass coward, a guy who's too fucked up to tell her to get lost, but also too scared to do what he said he would do.

Given how little contact Ted had now with actual Anna, it was like he was in a relationship with an imaginary friend.

You want this, right? You know you want this. So go on. Finish it. Finish what you started.

He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.

Whenever he was bored or anxious, his brain distracted itself by worrying at the question of whether he could ever make Anna like him, like a dog working the last bits of marrow from a bone.

Anna loves Ted, but she does not want him in a way that causes her to suffer; she does not want him desperately, despite herself. And it turns out that is how Ted has always wanted to be wanted: the way he has always wanted women. The way Anna wanted Marco, and he wanted Anna, and Rachel (or so it seems, in retrospect) wanted him.

In the absence of this painful wanting, Ted has trouble getting hard.

Ted thinks: Everyone at this party could die tonight, including me, and I wouldn't even care. He gets very drunk.

Ted was wildly uncomfortable. He wasn't quite sure who Rachel was on a date with, but it didn't seem to be him. He'd contributed nothing to the outing; as far as he could tell, she could have brought an inflatable doll with her to the movie and had an equally good time.

Maybe I was wrong, Ted thought. Maybe I could be content with this.

Unfortunately, he could not.

I had done magic.

Sometimes, when people in stories encounter the paranormal, they react with horror as the fabric of reality shreds and they are faced with the dawning recognition that everything they once believed was a lie. As I stared down at my phone, I had that exact feeling, except the opposite: not horror but a giddy, mounting joy. This was what all those books had promised. I knew it, I thought. I knew the world was more interesting than it was pretending to be.

Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way.

She wants what she wants," Kath says.

Don't we all?

When they got married, she could include them in her wedding vows: You were always there for me, always. You were always there for me, always. You were always there for me, always.

They were the most beautiful words he'd ever heard.

Oh, my God, Ted," she moaned, fakely.

They dated for the next four months.

Listen, listen. I can explain. There's a bad Ted underneath the good Ted, yes, but then, under that, there's a Ted who's good for real. But no one ever sees him; his whole life, no one ever has. Underneath it all, I'm just that kid who wanted nothing more than to be loved and didn't know how to make it happen, even though I tried and tried and tried.

What is wrong with me, that even this fucking loser won't give me what I want?

When I try to reconstruct the place that I was, at that point in my life, to figure out how I got there, to that punch, to that bed, to that girl - I can't. I can see where some bad decisions led to some other bad decisions, but I can't get all the way there; it's like I imagine a curve, where I'm dropping lower and lower down, and then I'm off the radar screen, invisible, and then, after some time goes by, the line is rising, visible again, and I don't know what happened in between.

. . . while we cooed and fretted and bent our faces into sympathetic shapes in his direction.

What do you want to do now?" he asked her.

"We should probably just kill ourselves," she imagined saying.

Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she'd realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.

Frankly, the whole concept was a little too New Age - y for me.

Ted kisses Rachel with tongue and squeezes her ass. In doing so, he discovers that it is possible to enjoy something and yet not care about it in the slightest. He finds this sensation - feeling pleasure, and simultaneously feeling detached from the pleasure - to be, itself, quite pleasurable. He wonders if he has miraculously become a Buddhist, or suffered a psychotic break.

As Anna poured her heart out over the phone, Ted's own heart lit up like a solar flare. He wanted nothing more than to show Anna how he saw her: how beautiful and perfect she was in his eyes. He needed to let her know that he was going to carry that memory - that knowledge - of her inside him, so that no matter what happened between them, no matter how down she got on herself, he could do this for her: he could love her, selflessly and unceasingly, with total commitment and purity, for the rest of his life.

An hour later, Anna sniffled. 'Thank you for listening, Ted,' she said. 'It really means a lot to me.'

I would die for you, Ted thought.

'No problemo,' Ted said.

Ted would have preferred not to live like this, but he wasn't quite sure what to do about it.

On the other hand, she happily kept him informed about plans she had with other people, providing a steady flow of information about excursions that were about to happen, details of dates or parties that were always this close to coming together. As long as he listened, without complaint, to an endless description of activities that were supposed to happen without him, there was a 30 percent chance, at least, that Anna would change her mind at the last minute, claim to be unable to handle the unbearable burden of whatever her social plans were supposed to be, and decide to hang out with him instead. She'd arrive at his house and collapse in exaggerated relief: "I am so glad we're doing this, I was so not in the mood for another party at Maria's." As though they were both equally at the mercy of circumstance, similarly oblivious to the power dynamic that governed their "friendship.

There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad.

Why did no one satisfy her? What was she looking for that she couldn't find? Her battered heart offered her no answers.

All I've ever wanted is to be loved. Well, to be worshiped. To be desired, madly and painfully, to the exclusion of all else. Is that so wrong?

But surely something had changed between them! Surely she wouldn't treat him, now, the way she had then, not after she'd spoken the words aloud: You were always there for me, always, but I never appreciated it, I always took you for granted.

And if she spent rather more time with her nose in a book than was considered ideal at that time (or any other), well, at least that meant she always had a story to tell.

He felt like something deep inside had broken. He'd asked for nothing; he'd tried to content himself with as little as it was possible to want. Yet here he was, feeling humiliated and small once again.

Her memory like a skipping record, bumping continually up against the scratch.

Thinking about it too hard makes her angry: ardent Taylor, who wants more passionately than anyone Kath has ever met, deserves more than these insulting parodies of lust. But what does Taylor want?

She puts her head on his shoulder, and for a second, it's like the other good night, the night of the bonfire, the brief lifting of the yoke, freedom from the circle: Marco hurting Anna, Anna hurting Ted, Ted hurting Rachel, these endless rounds of jealousy and harm.

The opportunities available to actors who achieved the peak of their fame as nameless characters in 1990s softcore horror porn films must be limited.

Using covertly acquired information to feign a mysterious psychic bond was a new realm of deception for Ted.

Ted thought maybe he could start a fight about Shelly that could serve as a distraction. Or maybe he should just knock over the nearest video display and flee the state.

Why do you like me? Why can't you tell I'm not that into you?

He felt ashamed of himself, of course, but the warmth of that shame pooled in his crotch, amplifying his pleasure.

She doesn't know what to call it - this free-falling sensation she feels every time she looks at Taylor, like her hands are closing again and again on emptiness - but she thinks she knows better than to call it love.

But he still wished Anna would do something to reassure him - ideally burst into tears and say, You were always there for me, always, and plead with him to forgive her for all her years of neglect - but he'd have settled for even a hint that she intended to make an active effort to meet up.

Anna, are you asleep?"

He imagined Anna lying awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, her heart full of yearning, but there was only silence.

"I love you, Anna," he whispered, and he hung up the phone.

And yet sometimes he'd lie awake at night imagining Rachel telling her story to a tribunal of all the girls who'd ever rejected him, regaling them about his deceptions, the way he'd pretended to like her when he didn't, the mask of 'niceness' he wore when the truth was he was a selfish, lying piece of shit - and he saw all those girls, Anna at their center, shocked but not shocked, nodding and agreeing that yes, of course, they'd known something was wrong with him all along.