What doyouthink?
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160 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2003
Genre:YA
Is it the main pairing:Yes
When you were a baby I sat very still to hold you. I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. How could skin be that thin? I was afraid you might drop and break. I stopped breathing so you wouldn’t…. Then you reached out and curled your fingers around mine… That was the first time I knew I had a heart inside my body.
You jerked up and looked at me. You were in bed with the sheet over you and the room smelled close. I smelled your pot and beer and your smell — salty, warm, baked. I read in a magazine that women aren’t supposed to be attracted to the smells of their father and brothers.
We’d stop for rocky road ice cream in Westwood on the way home and I picked out the nuts and gave them to you, you plucked marshmallows out for me.
If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.
I asked Michelle to go and get you. I could have told her, I guess, but I didn’t. I wanted you. I was scared and you were always who I went to when I was scared. I was practically stuck to my seat. The wetness pooling underneath me. I looked up at you. You had come running. There was sweat on you face, your eyes all pupil. Hey, you, you said, down on your knees looking at me. Hey you what is it you scared me you okay?
I never looked at other boys. I tried, as I got older, to like them. I tried to like my square-jawed dance partner in sixth grade graduation… I tried teen idols with their skinny bodies and whiny voices… I tried to like Robby Rydell because he was a good skateboarder but he caught me with a jump-rope lasso and tried to stick his tongue in my mouth on the playground before he ever said hi. I really tried hard to like Brent Fisher because it seemed important that I find somebody at that point. Not somebody to fill a space. There was never a space.
They were walking together and laughing and he thought that must be her boyfriend.
She was the farthest I could get from you. That’s what I wanted.
One of the guys from out there came over… He said hey, asked you who I was. You asked him why he wanted to know. He flashed his sharp teeth at you. He said why’d you think? because I was a babe. You said I was your sister and you looked like a statue.
He may have a basement full of artillery but if he ever comes near you I am going to kill him.
She said that Marina would regret this. She said it’s one thing to keep someone to yourself when they’re alive, but when they’re dead it’s really sick.
Don’t worry, Marina handles her fine. But it’s strongly implied that this girl, or someone else in her posse, or someone else entirely, guessed or suspected about the incest and threatened Lex with the knowledge and that’s how he winds up committing suicide.
I love this book so much. At the same time it is just.so.painful. to read. It unequivocally frames Lex and Marina’s story as a love story rather than as deviant behavior, which is all to the good. And it’s like Trope City here. But Lex essentially commits suicide out of guilt for the intensity of his feelings for Marina, which — last time I checked the world was not suffering any shortage of incest stories where it ends badly for the protagonists. And then…. plot twist! (I know I said there was no plot but somehow there is a plot twist.) Turns out Lex was adopted. Cue the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic.” Marina is livid when she confronts her mother about it:
I said I had a right to know, why didn’t she tell me?
Do you think I didn’t see what was between you? Do you think I could tell you he wasn’t really your brother ad have my children…
She couldn’t finish it and I couldn’t tell her that it had happened anyway.
Welp. So that happened. And when she recounts the conversation to West, he says:
Isn’t it harder now, that you know you could have?
It’s the same thing. He was my brother anyway. When someone is something to you, it’s always that.
Which about sums up how I feel about it too.
« Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to unfurl uncurl little green shoots and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. By the time this garden reaches your brain the old things are dead. They make no sense. The logic of the seeds sprouted inside of you is the only real thing. »