Mandy QUOTES

1 " …I love you,” he said to her, although at that point he was certain she could no longer comprehend the words. “I’d trade places with you in an instant, Mandy Valems… you never deserved this… why would anyone do something so terrible!?” A cold chill froze his heart when he saw her empty eyes again.The fluorescent lights in the dim room sparked to life all of a sudden, brightness so sharp that it startled him. In a flash, sharp and sudden, quicker than a lightning strike, the bulbs flickered and exploded with a few jingling pops. "

2 " Well, you’re not exactly social, are you, Mandy Valems?”“Oh yeah, sure, because I’m just surrounded by genius to be social with in this day and age,” Mandy replied with razor-sharp sarcasm. “Hey, I don’t need anyone else! I’ve got you, you’re my friend, and you’ll be with me forever!”“…You won’t be with me forever, though…” said Alecto cynically. “I’m like a spider’s web; anyone who is friends with me gets dragged into my troubles and eventually dies.”“…Poetic, dear friend,” Mandy sighed, shaking her head. “Morbid, but poetic. "

3 " Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?” Mandy questioned sadly. “All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers… Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now… I’ve only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?”“C'est la vie,” said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield. "

4 " Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. “You ever read Hamlet?” he questioned.“I tried to when I was in high school,” said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. “I mean, it’s expected that everyone should like Shakespeare’s books and plays, but I just….” her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. “What’s so funny, Sir?” she added, slightly offended.“…Oh, I’m not laughing at you, just with you,” said the store owner. “Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You’re honest Ma’am, that’s all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things… and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you’ll enjoy them so much more because you’ll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example – Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him.”“…Wow, when you put it that way… sure, I think I’ll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?” Mandy replied with a smile. "

5 " I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs. "

6 " 7 Up soda pop mixed with bright pink grenadine with a chemical-tasting maraschino cherry stuck to the plastic straw. It was one of those drinks marketed for children, but Mandy could see that she wasn’t the only adult ordering one. For some reason or other these old-fashioned restaurants always seemed to attract old ladies ordering strawberry Jell-O with whipped cream, truck drivers ordering “worms and dirt” (chocolate pudding with Oreo cookies squished over the top in a glass bowl, fruit-flavoured gummy worms over the cookie crumbs) and businessmen trying not to get syrup from their hot fudge sundaes on their neckties and tailored suits. Mandy figured that maybe they were all trying to grasp a time way back in the past when they were all little children, excitedly ordering desert for a special occasion under the warm incandescent light from above, cheerful and bouncing music filling their minds. Hurriedly she ate the food, paid the tab and hurried back to her car in the bitter wind, not wanting to stick around for very long. "

7 " She shakily rushed towards the car to find Alecto casually standing beside it, smoking a cigarette and staring fixedly on the radio as it played the song 'Draggin’ the Line' by Tommy James, his expression thoughtful. “What are you thinking about?” Mandy questioned.“Wouldn’t the world be a very loud place to live if we said everything we thought?” Alecto asked quietly. "

8 " Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?”“It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!”“You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal. "

9 " Amanda, you finally decided to answer the phone,” her mom exclaimed after picking up at the first ring. “Where’ve you been, what’ve you been up to?”“Mom, do you remember when I was a kid, I had a friend, he was a Personification of the Sydney Tar Ponds, sort of my imaginary friend?” Mandy asked.“No, what in the name of god are you on about?” her mom sighed in exasperation.“Remember? Only I could see him, but he was real and he was my best friend when I was eighteen?” Mandy insisted.“No, I don't remember Alecto Sydney Steele at all,” said her mom all too quickly. "

10 " Mandy was thinking back to when she was five years old, when she, her parents and Jud went outside before Christmas and had a snowball fight with the gray snow of Sydney Mines. “This is a wicked blast,” Jud would say, and Mandy would snap photos with a 35mm disposable film camera, photos she wished very much she could step into sometimes. "

11 " They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!”“Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget. "

12 " I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing. "

13 " Oh, I’m Chrissy Mackenzie, I’m from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,” the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. “You got any advice?”“Search me,” Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. “I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it’s in favor of all that “go green” hippie crap.” “Oh, well….” Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. “Damn it, I’m really sorry,” she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. “It’s just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn’t really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there.” Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them. "

14 " …Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. "

15 " What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.“I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously.“Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky.“…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.“Yeah, sure,” he answered.“Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked.“…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed. "

16 " We’re losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn… digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber,” Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. “Society is… it’s slipping away. "

17 " There was nothing Mandy had wanted more than to give her full attention to the world of Personifications and ignore those who ignored her in society. She’d wanted to talk out loud to Alecto, to have conversations in front of other ordinary people. Unfortunately, to do that in front of ordinary people would only prove her insanity, and although Mandy was naïve at times, she wasn’t stupid. "

18 " Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn’t care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn’t just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life’s best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes. "

19 " Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future. "

20 " Kipster is a perfectly valid word,” Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. “Okay, so what does it mean?” Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it… it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.“Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there’s a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won’t go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and….”Mandy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she’d learned it from Jud’s death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days. "