When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

With wild eyes that had seen freedom.

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.