C.J. Omololu > Quotes

“I closed the cover and stared at it. How dare she have dreams while making all of us live like this? She was the parent—she could have done something about it. She was the one with the power to make our lives like the people in the notebook, but instead she buried us all under tons of filth and shame.”
― C.J. Omololu, Dirty Little Secrets

“I reached out and curled my hand around her still, icy fingers. I held it there for a long time as I sat with my knees to my chest, wishing that just for a minute she could squeeze it back and tell me everything would be okay.”
― C.J. Omololu, Dirty Little Secrets

“If it was her diary, it would be wrong to open it. More wrong than leaving her dead in the hallway for the better part of a day? I shrugged my shoulders as I opened the black cardboard cover. It was all relative. It wasn’t a diary—not really. Carefully pasted onto the pages of notebook paper were magazine pictures of different houses. There was a picture of a wide, green lawn with a house perched way off in the distance and a family having a picnic on a postage-stamp-sized blanket. There were dining rooms with long tables where people could linger after a meal and talk about politics or sports. A bedroom with a white canopy bed big enough for a mom and kids to curl up on a Sunday morning and read the newspaper. Every now and then on the page would be something written very carefully in her sprawling handwriting.”
― C.J. Omololu, Dirty Little Secrets