“She is a slave, with no way home.”
— Heather Demetrios
“He looks like the kind of boy who would jump trains, strum guitars, and pass a joint.”
— Heather Demetrios
“You can’t screw up your own suicide and then expect the universe to give you presents wrapped in the skin of a wonderful boy. That’s just not the way it works.”
— Heather Demetrios
“If my sister were a character in a Victorian drama, she would be the snobbish rich girl with a penchant for talking shit about everyone behind their fan.”
— Heather Demetrios
“The past is past. You tried to kill yourself. So what? I humped a couch in season twelve. We all have our skeletons.”
— Heather Demetrios
“Even Mom doesn’t understand how being in front of a camera all the time twists and warps you. How one second it makes you feel unbelievably alive and the next publicly strips you down until all that’s left is one big question mark.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I’m not Bonnie™ or Chloe. I’m the essence of her, the nontrademarked person the camera can never capture and my parents have no right to sign over. There is a sovereign nation encased in this skin that MetaReel can never trademark.”
— Heather Demetrios
“Somehow, the pain and rage and confusion of the past eighteen years dissolves until all that is left is this one perfect moment; unscripted, unedited, it’s ours and ours alone.”
— Heather Demetrios
“Hate is a lot like love. It’s warm and fills you up until every part of you is tingling to release it.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I don’t like seeing myself on camera.” But that’s not it–that sounds shallow, like I’m worried I’ll look fat or something. “It’s like somebody is walking on my grave. TV immortalizes you. The episodes are what my family would watch if I died.”
— Heather Demetrios
“This, I think, is a little glimpse of what life could be like without my family. Home could be a place of laughter and love, a refuge. I’m filled with a terrifying weightlessness, like I’ve jumped off a cliff, but I know that if I don’t look down, I’ll be just fine.”
— Heather Demetrios
“You know those primitive tribal people who believed a camera could steal your soul? Turns out they were right.”
— Heather Demetrios
“This night felt like a last hurrah, like we could blaze our brightest, at the apex of our insane adolescence. This was our Mardi Gras before the dark days of Lent.”
— Heather Demetrios
“After a lifetime of wanting to be loved, she didn’t think she could bear it if it finally happened just before she was about to die.”
— Heather Demetrios
“My life was being planned in sentences that started with ‘We’ instead of ‘I’, yet it felt like the most natural transition in the world.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I’m the girl who’s desperate to get out of her small town because if she doesn’t she knows she’ll die. She knows her soul will start to rot, like fruit gone bad.”
— Heather Demetrios
“Look at this beautiful world!”
— Heather Demetrios
“Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn’t feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I’d always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I’d planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I’d make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I’ve never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.”
— Heather Demetrios
“My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.”
— Heather Demetrios
“I thought of all the summer evenings I’d spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn’t have been further away from the trailer park.”
— Heather Demetrios
“A little bit closer to the stars, anything seemed possible.”
— Heather Demetrios