Ex scientia ultio. From knowledge comes vengeance.

“You made me who I am. You made me who I was always supposed to be.”

I want to memorize the warmth of her skin, the way her eyes sparkle like smoke quartz when she laughs.

You’re obsessed with magic because you can’t stand to live with yourself otherwise.

Ellis looks like one of the works we analyzed in Art History, a painting in chiaroscuro. Perfect at first glance, but lean closer and you’ll see the brushstrokes.

I am closer to shade than girl. I am no more substantial than bone dust.

Once she’s turned away I let my fingertips graze mahogany. I touch the same place she had touched, and it’s like a cord drawn taut between us–as intimate as skin.

She doesn’t understand how magic can pull you in, pull you under. Every spell is a pomegranate seed on your tongue, binding you to the underworld.

’You’re–’ You’re incredible. You’re inexorable. You’re merciless.

The question isn't whether magic is real. It's whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.

For coffee-stained girls in libraries.

The poems circle the same question: how one’s soul could possibly endure when life’s beauty vanishes from reach.

That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.

I should have paid better attention. I should have marked the smaller crosses and stars on her skin, should have found the truth written in her flesh. I should have known she was a killer.

The storm batters against my back, tries to peel me off this rock like lichen. But I am not lichen. I am limestone and schist, veined with quartz. I am immovable.

When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted. I could imagine other realities. I envisioned the tales so clearly that it was as if I lived them.

With bright eyes and souls they sold to literature. Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic

The problem is, I don’t have anything I want to read. I peruse the shelves, but nothing jumps out at me. I feel as if I’ve read everything—every book in the world. Every title seems like a reiteration of something that came before it, the same story regurgitated over and over.

And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.

But bitch felt like a harsh word to apply to a girl who was fighting so hard to make space for herself in a world that didn’t want her.

For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky is clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.