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"That sounds like a good idea, but how exactly--"
"You will not speak The button is useless to you The Neitherlands are closed But the first door is still open It always has been"
Quentin’s knees suddenly felt stiff froed He wanted to spit the salt water out of hisbut on whipped its tail out fro up a cloud of silt
"You may thank me now"
Wait, what? Quentin opened his on of the Grand Canal like a good boy, or to ask hi in riddles, he would never know, because he choked instead He couldn’t breathe The spell was gone, and he was gagging on filthy, freezing canal water He was drowning
He left his one re shoe stuck in the mud and kicked his way crazily up toward the surface
CHAPTER 15
Oh, the return of the prodigal! The rapture hich Julia was received back into the do faces of her parents, a pair of rain-soaked headlights trained upon her, as she presented herself to them in the form of a reprobate reformed She had disappointed them so many times, in so many ways, they hardly dared to hope anyrief they’d lost count
Now here she was, returned from Chesterton, her spirit crushed, ready to be part of the faain, and they let her They actually let her With a kindness utterly unlike anything she recognized in herself, they took her back, even though she could not have deserved it less The wreck of the good ship Julia, out of Brooklyn, carrying the precious cargo of Their Love, was ready to be hauled off the Reef of Life and salvaged and refloated, and they did it They took her back without a word of reproach
Noas Julia’s turn to grieve, and they let her, which was another gift She ician she would never be She buried that rief, unbidden, ca so hard, for so long, to be so the world did not want her to be Now she could finally stop The world had won She yielded to her fareat about ic anyway, compared to love? Seriously, what?
Oh, the timorous overtures of her sister, the huh school herself As she labored over her college applications, Julia reactivated her own They worked on the tips, her sister coaching her on her essay, Julia dragging her sister through basic calculus by ain, the two of theotten what it felt like to be part of a faood it could feel, and how endary seven acceptances, only Stanford’s could be salvaged, but that was enough There was a gap or three in her résumé, sure, but if you cocked your head and blurred your eyes you could take her raphic project So it was sunny California for her Just what she needed Fun in the sun Put so up cash and ed
Because Julia had given up She was packing it in She washed her hands of the realhly washed their hands of her She would take a page fro utopian socialists she’d written about for Mr Karras: when your sacred intentional community collapses, it’s time to suck it up and sell silverware instead
Julia would take a page from Jack Donne At the end of the poem, hadn’t he run to the Goat (by which he allantly informed her) to find New Love? Or was it lust? Or maybe it turned out it was too late for hi unintelligible Anyway it had a happy ending Ish
She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where,On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on hoo back, she knew that now The dom was closed to her But some days she couldn’t see a way forward either