First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book
Lines
Hands, hearts, hugs. I am bombarded at every turn. But I don’t know these hands, these hearts, these hugs. They are peripheral, the entire senior class only seen through the corner of my vision. None of them are the hands, hearts, and hugs I want. “So sorry, Jess.” “Really sucks, Jess.” “How does shit like this happen?” Best question of the day. How. Does. Shit. Like. This. Happen. And it begins. A collapsing. All of me, falling slowly in on myself. “Jess, hon.” Mom’s hand lands featherlight on my shoulder. The multiton concrete of my body lists toward the familiar touch. A ragged breath escapes, a tear pools in the corner of my eye, then the pool becomes a river, and I can’t even try to hold it back, it simply flows. Mom holds me, a steadying pressure that is the only thing keeping me from sinking into the cracks in the ground or flying off into the atmosphere. Voices murmur. It’s a last-minute memorial, hastily put together by Vivi’s parents so the students of Grady High School can grieve as a group. But none of them, no one else in this room, can crawl down into the crater in which I now dwell.
And The Book Is…
Alex
Mybookworld24 