Monday's Not Coming Quotes
"Every summer, Ma sent me down to Georgia to stay with my grandmamma for two months. Monday and I would write letters to each other with funny drawings and ripped-out magazine articles, keeping up with the latest neighborhood gossip and music. But that summer was different. Monday never responded to any of my letters."
"Ma and I spent the rest of the evening tackling my braids, then washing and straightening out my hair. Exhausted, I finally climbed into bed close to midnight, ignoring the gnawing in my stomach. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put a finger on it."
"Ma always drove me to school on the first day, taking off a few hours from the veterans’ canteen. They’d miss her for sure, leaving their kitchen a mess without her running it. But she always says, 'You only get one shot at your kids, so you need to hit the bull’s-eye.'"
"We’d saved our money and bought enough stamps to make it through the eight weeks without each other, since Grandmamma don’t like the kids playing on her phone and my cousin already hogged up the line talking to her man. Monday knew I hated writing, but we promised to keep in touch, and you don’t just back out of promises. Not with your best friend since the first grade."
"Breadcrumbs, Claudia. Always good to leave breadcrumbs."
"A true southerner, she never felt safe in the city, despite living here since I was born."
"A whole week and no word from Monday? Something was up, and I had to find out what, with or without them."
"Ms. O’Donnell, a name I would grow to hate over the year, taught eighth-grade English. She had short, curly graying-blond hair and a white face full of deep lines behind huge glasses."
"Mondays were Monday’s favorite day of the week, and not just ’cause she was named after it. She loved the day itself. She’d be at school, early as ever, brighter than sunshine, even in the dead of winter with wind that could freeze our eyelids shut."
"I could go a whole dance season without saying a word to the girls in my class. I wasn’t good at making new friends. Never needed to. I had Monday, and that’s all that mattered."
"I imagined being in our invisible bubble where their slick talk couldn’t hurt me, my force field impenetrable."
"Eyes scorched the back of my head red and I cowered inside my bubble for the remainder of class."
"Lost in that go-go beat, I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror, noticing the way my swiveling hips made my ass shake."
"My best friend dropped off the face of the earth and I had no other friends to skip around to collect candy with."
"School should have been my biggest priority, but finding Monday topped everything."
"When you’re always cold, it’s easy to be drawn to the sun."
"Monday never mentioned going to camp. In fact, she swore she did nothing but hang out at home with her brother and sisters or chill on the basketball court, watching the games."
"Her eyes would flicker when she talked about him like sparks were caught between her eyelashes."
"Just like that, she was back to normal. Even though it looked like an army of trolls had beaten her with baseball bats, how could I not believe? She was my best friend. If she was lying, it had to be for a good reason."
"He asked me to do his hair, said he wanted it to be special and didn’t want everyone around."
"This just been a big mistake. I’ve just... there’s been a lot on my mind."
"Sometimes girls run away from their problems rather than ask for help."
"Everyone was looking for these girls, while I was the only one looking for Monday."
"Ma loved Christmas, so the tree had to be perfect or Christmas would be canceled."
"Missing from my life, yeah, but is she, like, missing for real?"
"We don’t have everything, but we have a lot to be grateful for."
"Just ’cause someone got a roof, don’t make it a home."
"Kids tend to forget they roots but roots always the first to carry you back home."
"You were made to light up this world, not to be cooped up in the house."
"If Monday were around, I don’t think she would’ve talked to half the people that walked in there today."
"Well, I’m here to catch you every time you think you’re about to fall. That’s what daddies are supposed to do."
"In this life, you don't always get what you want, but you must dance through it."
"Who makes up the rules for who your soul belongs to?"
"Just try to be in the moment... and forget about everything else that's going on."
"There's no warm-up—it jumps out the gate with a rumble."
"If you gonna do it, you wanna do it with someone special. Someone who makes you feel, I don't know, safe. Someone who’s good."
"My experience with boys was limited to my imagination and what Monday had told me. Which wasn’t much."
"I’m at a high school party! How would I tell Monday about this?"
"If I do this, they’ll stop calling me a lesbian, a baby, stuck up. If I do this, I’ll catch up to Monday. I won’t be left behind."
"Music got funny a way of reminding you of what you thought you lost."
"But just like a book, it felt only right to start from the beginning."
"The pages of the thick, well-used journal were crinkled almost to the very end."
"Another part of growing up, putting stupid fantasies out of your head."
"I thought she was my friend; I thought she cared about me."
"Sometimes, when something is going real fast, it can look real beautiful in slow motion."
"I wasn’t looking for her because I needed her—I was looking for her because she needed me."
"I knew all about missing your best friend and how substitutions didn’t fill the gaps left by their absence."
"Only after the shapes are colored in does a picture really appear."
"Every time I wake up from this nightmare I cry."
"In my twenty-two years on the force, I've never seen anything like this. The home was filthy and unlivable."
"Hello? Yes, my name is Michelle Valente. I’m a teacher at Warren Kent Charter School. One of my students, Monday Charles, has been missing, and I think there is something seriously wrong with her mother."
"Residents of Ed Borough are shocked by the tragedy that has hit their community after the discovery of the bodies of thirteen-year-old Monday Charles and nine-year-old August Charles."
"You got these buses of white folks driving around here with cameras around their necks like they’re on a safari, hunting for their new home. Of course she went crazy!"
"I heard crying some days, but my kids cry too when they about to get a whupping. I can’t walk up in her home and cast stones."
"How could you even think that? Don’t you get it? You’re the one that knew something was wrong all along. You saw what folks didn’t see, which means you’re smarter than everybody else."
"You did save her, Claudia! You saved her from that house for years and you didn’t even know it."
"It’s all about the way you look at it. You got to decide what something is or isn’t. It may have been buzzing, but I decided it’s humming. Someone is just humming a song in my ear. A pretty song."