"Prep"

[fiefoe]

<Naivete>

• How could I speak of my parents casually, ever, at all, unless I was not really thinking of them but thinking only of the words my mom and my dad?
• At the time, the topic had made me feel smart and grown-up, to be talking with my mother... not chitchat, but an idea, a concept.
• When I thought of Sin-Jun and Clara-and I did so often-what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they'd been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks doing homework? Hadn't it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar?
• I wanted to have boyfriends, I wanted my life to be sorrowful and complicated and unwholesome, at least a little unwholesome.
• (I fear my own malleability..)
• I was observing my schoolmates with a kind of awe, how they had so many sets of behavior in their repertoire.
  

<Boys>

• I felt a familiar jealousy of boys. I didn't want what they had, but I wished that I wanted what they wanted; it seemed like happiness was easier for them.
• As I watched the milkshake tumble into his mouth, I felt that affection you feel for boys when you see one of the ways they're different from you that's not a bad way.
• At least it seemed preferable to the way I was, trying to look pretty, trying to seem smart, when wasn't I just as full of disgusting urges as any boy?
  

<Needy, sensitive, neurotic...Being Lee is not a walk in the park.>

• I always climbed into bed when I got sick of studying - I wasn't sure what else to do - and lay there under the sheets, facing the wall, my eyes shut. If someone came by to see Dede, they'd enter the room speaking in a normal voice, then see me and whisper, "Oh, sorry," or else, "Whoops," and I would feel strangely flattered.
• Even in complimenting Gates, my own neediness would rear up.
• I knew right away that this was one protest too many; the amount that I needed him to convince me that it was okay to come, that he wanted me to come, exceeded the amount that he cared. "Actually, wait. I will go."
• I'd realized that it was an act of aggression not to react to a situation as everyone else was reacting, a request for attention.
• I felt jealous of them, of how, because of their parts in the play, they'd had to become comfortable kissing so publicly, how during the weeks of rehearsal they'd had that kiss to count on. Every day, they'd known they would touch another person, and it didn't depend on anything external; it didn't matter what they did or didn't do.
• And not feel strongly about things? I felt strongly about everything-not just my interactions with people, their posture or their inflections, but also the physical world, the smell of the wind, the overhead lights in the math wing, the precise volume of the radio in the bathroom if it was playing while I brushed my teeth. Everything in the world I liked or disliked, wanted more or less of, wanted to end or to continue.
• I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will.
• it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of the thing than the thing itself.
• I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.
  

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