Roses and Rot Read Online Free

beaten. Maybe you got beaten, but at least you never had broken bones. You think of the worst thing that happened to you, and then you think of something even worse than that. If you survived, you always can, and so by pained, contorted logic, what happened to you wasn’t really that bad.
    Maybe your mother tried to break you, to tell you that you were nothing, that you’d never matter, that you were a waste of her time, but she never succeeded. Maybe you still have scars, but those marks on your skin mean you’ve lived long enough to heal.
    Maybe you lived, once, a life full of secrets. Ones you could never tell, not because you didn’t know the words, but because you had learned, time and time again, that the words didn’t matter. People would rather believe a pretty lie than an ugly truth, and you were always the one who wasn’t believed. So you learned the power in silence, and in secrets. Maybe you still look over your shoulder, but at least you got away.
    And after all, if you’d had a childhood that was different, one that didn’t always feel like walking on knives, maybe you would never have found your voice. If you hadn’t been forced to swallow your words, you would have never learned the power in speaking them.
    This is what you tell yourself. This is how you keep breathing. This is what happily ever after means.

    I woke soon after going to sleep, as the fingers of dawn were beginning to pluck at the edges of the sky, to find my room full of butterflies. An entire kaleidoscope of them, orange and red and black and electric, Nabokov blue. Their wings were opening and closing slowly, and it seemed as if my walls moved in time with the beat of some unknown heart.
    I lay in bed, not moving, barely even breathing, just watching. Minutes passed, or maybe hours. It felt like I was in a cathedral, some holy place outside of time.
    The next time I woke up, the butterflies were gone, no sign that any of them had ever been there. I had nearly convinced myself thatit was a particularly vivid dream when I saw, on the open page of my notebook, a smear of iridescent dust.
    I don’t like the idea of signs and portents. People like to say fate is inescapable, but I believe there’s always an escape. We make our own luck, and we do that by bending our will and energy toward what we want. I think that if you look for an omen, you’ll find one, and it will tell you exactly what you desire it to, for good or ill. It would have been easy, had I wanted, to think of that tiny, shimmering smudge as some sort of sign, but I didn’t need it to be. I didn’t need signs. I had myself.

3
    Marin had hung amber-colored curtains over the windows so that the light turned her room warm and honey-gold. We strung red fairy lights around the top of the ceiling, just beneath the molding, then stepped back to take in the effect.
    “I like it—elegant and welcoming,” I said.
    “Did you bring your stars?” she asked.
    “Of course I did.” Marin had given me a set of glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on my ceiling when she moved into her first apartment, sending them completely out of the blue. What she had called a “reverse housewarming present” had broken through four years of silence, and helped us start talking again. I had put them up in every one of my bedrooms since. “They’re arranged in constellations and everything.”
    “Your favorite mythologies, all set out on the ceiling.” Marin folded herself onto the bed, then began sewing the ribbons on a new pair of pointe shoes. “Just like you always said you would have.”
    “Rearranging the stories so the ones that should be next to each other are,” I said.
    “You used to tell me stories about the stars when we were kids,” she said, not looking up from her sewing. “When I couldn’t sleep. About the two princesses who lived in the star palaces. Remember?”
    “They had a constellation carousel, to move the sky into place fortheir adventures.” I pressed the