Maddie

“Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner’s shirt a few inches, like I’m shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I’m not anything. least of all what I am.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“She'd laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise’s thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything. But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch’s mark, the blot of Lise’s body that reminded you of what she had been -a plump, awkward girl- before the lithesome beauty took her place.

It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.”
― Megan Abbott

“She was desperate,
she was deathless. I’d have followed her
anywhere she asked of me. I’d have
thrown myself to the wild for her.”
― Elisabeth Hewer, Wishing for Birds