Girl in Pieces

 
ONE

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I can never win with this body I live in.
Belly, Star

 
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LIKE A BABY HARP SEAL, I M ALL WHITE. MY FOREARMS are thickly bandaged, heavy as clubs. My thighs are wrapped tightly, too; white gauze peeks out from the shorts Nurse Ava pulled from the lost and found box behind the nurses station.
    Like an orphan, I came here with no clothes. Like an orphan, I was wrapped in a bedsheet and left on the lawn of Regions Hospital in the freezing sleet and snow, blood seeping through the flowered sheet.
    The security guard who found me was bathed in menthol cigarettes and the flat stink of machine coffee. There was a curly forest of white hair inside his nostrils.
    He said, Holy Mother of God, girl, what s been done to you?
    My mother didn t come to claim me.
    But: I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth.
    That mattered to me, their accidental beauty. The last thing I thought I might see before I died on the cold, wet grass.

 
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THE GIRLS HERE, THEY TRY TO GET ME TO TALK. They want to know What s your story, morning glory? Tell me your tale, snail. I hear their stories every day in Group, at lunch, in Crafts, at breakfast, at dinner, on and on. These words that spill from them, black memories, they can t stop. Their stories are eating them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.
    I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.

 
***
 
 
I ROOM WITH LOUISA. LOUISA IS OLDER AND HER HAIR IS like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There s so much of it, she can t even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I ve ever known. I could breathe her

Kathleen Glasgow is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces and How to Make Friends with the Dark. She lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona. To learn more about Kathleen and her writing, visit her website, kathleenglasgowbooks.com, or follow @kathglasgow on Twitter and @misskathleenglasgow on Instagram.

A New York Times Bestseller
An Amelia Bloomer Project Award Selection
A New York Public Library Best Book for Teens

Girl, Interrupted meets Speak. Refinery29
 
A dark yet powerful read. Paste Magazine
 
One of the most affecting novels we have read. Goop
 
Breathtaking and beautifully written. Bustle
 
Intimate and gritty. The Irish Times

"A haunting, beautiful, and necessary book that will stay with you long after you've read the last page." Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything

"Equal parts keen-eyed empathy, stark candor, and terrible beauty. This book is why we read stories: to experience what it's like to survive the unsurvivable; to find light in the darkest night."-Jeff Zentner, author of The Serpent King

"Raw, visceral, and starkly beautiful, with writing that is at times transcendent in its brilliance. . . . An unforgettable story of trauma and resilience."--Kerry Kletter, author of The First Time She Drowned

"A breathtakingly written book about pain and hard-won healing . . . I want every girl to read Girl In Pieces."-Kara Thomas, author of The Darkest Corners and The Cheerleaders

A Girl, Interrupted for a new generation .The story of the mad girl is ultimately a story about being a girl in a mad world, how it breaks us into pieces and how we glue ourselves back together." Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

Dark, frank, and tender, Girl in Pieces keeps the reader electrified for its entire journey. You re so uncertain if Charlie will heal, so fully immersed in hoping she does. Michelle Wildgen, author of Bread and Butter and You re Not You

"Girl in Pieces has the breath of life; every character in it is fully alive. Charlie Davis' complexities are drawn with great understanding and subtlety."-Charles Baxter, author of National Book