Avery

“I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever.

My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.

She said, "Don't be scared, little one."

I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so...momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces