“There are things you’re supposed to know,” she tells me. “Like look both ways before crossing the street, and righty-tighty lefty-loosey, and always wipe front to back, and so on.”
“And maybe there are things that you’re not supposed to know,” she says, “but you wind up with the memories of them anyway. Like how it tastes to have a mouthful of blood after your father’s slammed you into a wall, and the way a Rexall’s window shatters when struck by a towel-wrapped fist at three in the morning, and what it’s like to accompany your dead brother’s girlfriend to the abortion clinic so she doesn’t have to deal with the lines of protesters or the fluorescent-bulb waiting room by herself.”
“There are things you’re supposed to know,” she says, “and there are things you’re not supposed to know. But you reach a certain point and you just know all these things anyway. And no matter what you do, they stain the inside of you. But maybe what some of them do is more like bleach the inside of you – every day removing a little more color from where there should be nothing but rainbows, every day just ghosting you a little closer to the grave.”
“So, yes,” she says, staring at the photo of her parents. “I do regret killing them. But it’s a pale fucking regret.”