Books like Red Dragon

Danny? You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. There’s some things no six-year-old boy in the world should have to be told, but the way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it’s only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I. You’re a good boy.

I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can’t look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents’ place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can’t bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don’t want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can’t help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me.

The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man’s brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them.

It’s very weird, standing still for five minutes, blindfolded, in a perfectly silent room, knowing that guys might be looking at your boobs or your butt or whatever. There were no sounds or clues to help me guess what was happening. But I definitely felt them watching. I raised and lowered my hand several times, and the five minutes seemed to last an hour. After we finished, Susan asked me to repeat the experiment, and we did it all over again. Then she asked me to repeat the experiment a third time! And when she finally pulled off the blindfold, all the guys stood up and started clapping, like I’d just won an Academy Award.

Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practise being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.

I still remember her matted hair and wild eyes when I came to visit. She didn’t look like my best friend anymore—more like a wild animal closed up in a cage. But the thing that sticks with me most—the thing I will never forget—are the words she spit out at me just seconds before I ran out of the unit, swearing to myself I would never return ever again: You should be the one locked up here, Amy.