“While he reads it, she starts to walk back toward her mom’s car. When he’s finished, he calls after her, “MAYA!”
“WHAT?” she shouts back.
“DON’T LET THE BASTARDS SEE YOU CRY!”
She laughs with tears in her eyes. “NEVER, BENJI! NEVER!”
“It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.”