Re: [Secondhand books: Hannah & Aleksi]
"I don't think I read to remember," she said, and then she thought about it a moment longer, considering and considering, and she shook her head a little. "Maybe I read to remember what I thought I was. I remember a time when I felt normal, when I was as sure as I am that we're sitting here, at this table, and maybe reading reminds me of being that girl. I'm not her anymore," she explained, and she wasn't. She hadn't been that girl in a long, long time, and she wasn't exactly sure what she was now. "Like other people," she clarified of what she should be. "I'm not like other people." She wasn't, and she liked being honest. It wasn't completely, completely honest, but it was a truth, and she thought he deserved her truths. She felt the tug of that tether, of a nightmare experienced, and she didn't want to be false.
She looked around as he talked about his town and the small weirdnesses that bloomed there into very big ones. "When I came here, it was much more normal than now, and now it isn't, but I don't know that the things are big yet. It's more like a bunch of tiny things all living in one place, but they're all different and separate, and if they all joined together they'd be big, big." She tipped her head to the side with her usual gesture of curiosity, ear to shoulder and a blink of her cornflower eyes. "What happened to it? To your hometown?" she asked, because he talked about it like a place dead and long, long gone.
He shrugged and talked quietly, and she leaned forward, arms on the table and a cookie midway to her mouth, and she listened to the tale that he spun. "How did you get from there to here?" she asked, because his reality sounded even worse than the nightmare, and that was something she understood. Their nightmare, the one they'd shared, it hadn't really been bad, not really and not truly. "My parents bought a house once. One that was big and old and alive, and it was haunted. I know that sounds crazy, but it was true. It ate people, the house, and they were stuck there forever, and my mom went crazy there. She tried to kill my brother and I, so that we would stay with her for always and ever, and she died there." It was a lot and all at once, and it wasn't even her biggest secret. But it was something, and it was the something they'd shared in his woods.