I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.

If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.

I didn't understand what it was about men—not all men, but a good portion of them—that turned a good, solid “NO” into an “I'm just playing coy; try harder.

A woman isn't a whore for wanting pleasure. If it were unnatural, we would not be born with such drives.

In her view, there were threeoptions for a woman. If you were beautiful, you got married. If youwere ugly, you became a nun. If you were beautiful and stupid, orugly and dishonorable, you became a whore.

Maybe that was the root of my dislike for her: she had what I wanted, which earned her my jealousy, and since I was ashamed of myself for wanting it, my scorn, as well.

College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that was the wrong reason to go to college. That the potential for those things had been inside of me all along, only I'd never realized because I hadn't believed myself strong enough to break free without an intermediary.

Maybe it frightened them, to admit that a woman could be master of her fate.

Mámá was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she'd cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatio sauce.