“Did she really have to wait out seven more soul-shredding years? It was like being told you can run free one day – in June several years from now – but during every second of the intervening time, you’ll be getting run over by the world’s slowest steamroller, and every day it cracks a bone, and recracks it, and recracks it, and when you’re eighteen all you’re going to have is a body full of dust, lifted and carried into the future like a flag loose from its mast.”
