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The Secrets of Peaches

Book by Jodi Lynn Anderson · 11 quotes · Best Friends, Best Friends Forever, Dream

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The Secrets of Peaches Quotes

“Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.”

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“Why do you keep loving me, Birdie?” Birdie looked at her like she was really thinking about it. “I love you because you’re Leeda. I just… I don't know, I guess it’s too late to not love you. So I just accept you.” Leeda tried to harness what she wanted to say. It was hard to put it into words. “I can’t even imagine what kind of person you see when you look at me. I mean, I can't think of who it is you think you’re accepting.” Birdie put her hand on Leeda’s and crushed her fingers in her brave Birdie way. “Just you, Leeda. I just love you whoever you are.”

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“She stopped in Eckerds to flirt with a guy she knew there and get some free Blow Pops. She leaned over the counter and pursed her lips and moved up and down on her toes while he dug out all the watermelons, her favorite. There was a scale with a mirror next to the pharmacy counter, and she stared at herself sideways. With her low-slung jeans and junk store green army coat, Murphy looked high-fidelity, full-color, and healthy. The counter boy’s voice pitched high when he asked her, nervous and awed, if she wanted anything else. Murphy smiled and stuck a Blow Pop in her mouth as she turned and sauntered out the door.”

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“She flipped through the notebook. In most places, Murphy’s large, crooked handwriting ate up the pages greedily, as if she couldn’t write large enough to get her point across. Occasionally Birdie’s more graceful handwriting appeared, adding asides or participating with Murphy in some kind of list she had thrown together, like favorite Leeda moments, or most unknown things about Leeda, or Leeda’s top five best articles of clothing. Mostly, though, it was all Murphy. Listing albums Leeda had to own before she died, like Janis Joplin’s Pearl. Copied scraps of her favorite poetry: about nature and despair and cities and even one or two about love that Murphy had annotated with words like Sickening, but she’s good and Horrible but worth reading. Dried leaves---pecan, magnolia, and, of course, the thin slivered shape of the peach leaf---taped in messy crisscrosses. A cider label Birdie had once kissed. A diagram of Leeda---outlined sloppily with colored-in blond hair, with words on the outside pointing to different parts of her: brainy pointing to her head, good posture pointing to her back, hot gams pointing to her legs, impenetrable (ha ha) pointing to her heart.”

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“She didn’t remember that Enrico hadn’t called back until she woke up in the middle of the night, shooting out of a dream. She squinted in the dark, trying to recall where she’d been--- and then it came back to her. She’d been standing on the cartoon ground in Mexico, rocky and dry and flat, watching a single peach blossom blow across its surface. Birdie chased it, but it was too fast. It blew away from her.”

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“At times on the orchard, the leaves fluttered like locusts. At times they turned upside down and showed their white undersides in an almost embarrassing way. At times they turned orange and brown. And at times they kept spinning off the trees like whirligigs. Now they were perfectly, sublimely still, like an audience. Birdie moved her lips to Enrico’s and sighed into them, touching her forehead to his. From the trees, they looked like full-grown lovers.”

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