“I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. ‘She’ could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender – of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness – that would, finally, save me.”
