The [Sweet Valley High] books were the most familiar and resonant expressions of our angst and our fondest wishes for ourselves, the girls we wanted to become.

Sometimes, a momentary truce in girlhood is much more precious than a guy you really like asking you out, sticking around even after getting the milk for free.

This sensible, sensible girl. A girl who knew how to protect herself. Never a daredevil, never stunting without a safety mat, without spotters. A girl for whom instability was the ultimate enemy. Who’d never known divorce or slamming doors or slamming fists. A girl whose home was a peaceful sanctum, even the basement padded. A life that had to be made safe because of the risks she put her body through. She was the most dangerous thing in her own life. Her body, the only dangerous thing.

When does a girl stop growing up? At puberty? At eighteen? When she marries? When she gets her first white hair? Or does she never feel she’s grown up no matter how old she gets? Is she still filled with girlish dreams when she takes her last breath?

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

Peach pits are poisonous. This is not a mistake. Girlhood is growing fruit around cyanide. It will never be your for swallowing.

We fold our immigrant selves into this veneer of what we think is African American girlhood. The result is more jagged than smooth. This tension between our inherited identities and our newly adopted selves filters into our relationships with other girls and the boys we love, and how we interact with the broken places around us.

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.

Mama once told me before she died that my blonde hair makes the sun go wild with envy.

Even as you kept telling me that I'm becoming a woman, you never let me go out into the world to be free.