they love me. And I love my father, and I know he loves me; and if I start to push against these things, would I lose everything I have? In favor of what? Things I don’t have?
I don’t ask questions , I think. I never ask questions. Boys turn into monsters while I’m kissing them and the sewing of lace is cause for alarm and the gnomes are getting smarter and breaking into the oven. And I don’t ask questions . I let it all wash over me. Because I’m such a huge coward.
I bring my knees up and wrap my arms around them in the chill of the twilight and press my face into my lap. Kelsey sits next to me, silent and accepting, and I feel better for having her there. And I realize this is what it means to have friends. How perfectly, utterly, beautifully normal.
And maybe Kelsey and I can find our way to normal together. Maybe we’ll find my mother and we’ll find Kelsey’s father. Maybe I’ll learn Ben’s last name, and where he’s from, and why he thinks that my particular brand of normality is the best sort of normality. Maybe together, Kelsey and I will shake up all the boring normal of Boston’s Beacon Hill, all of its unchanging-ness, and have amazing adventures, and we will just change the world .
Or maybe we’ll just find our way to making our own sort of normality.
READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT
Coming June 2014
CHAPTER 1
One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
This is how the story of my birth goes.
My father says my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I always ask how she ended up on his couch. Where did she come from? I ask. Why was she there? Did you know her? My father always looks at me vaguely. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen , he tells me, and then he tells me the story of my name. Selkie , he says. She told me to name you Selkie. And I ask, How did she tell you? And he replies, She etched it into a snowflake, sighed it into a gust of wind, rustled it through the trees of autumn, rippled it over a summer pond.
And my aunts sigh and say, That’s enough .
And when I ask my aunts about my mother, all they will ever say is that she was “flighty.”
When I was little, I used to think maybe my mother would come to take me away. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue aren’t exactly my aunts. They are my dad’s aunts, making them my great-aunts, and therefore old—older than I could pinpoint when I was young. Now that I’m older, I know that they’re older than my dad, but I can’t quite figure out exactly how much older. Dad was their little brother’s only child, I know, but the dates of births in my family are fuzzy. Who wants to remember how old they are? Aunt True asks me. I have never had a birthday party. Or an acknowledgment of my birthday. But I do have a birthday.
It is today.
I am sitting on Boston Common, watching the tourists get lost and the leaves fall, and I am thinking. The Common is the huge park in the middle of Boston. The story I have always been told is that it was originally a cow pasture and that the paved paths meandering through it follow the original cow paths, and I believe that; there is an aimlessness to them. I like that about Boston Common. I like that the place feels like it has no discernible purpose, in this age without cows. It is unnecessary, a frivolity in the middle of the city, prime real estate that isn’t even landscaped , really, is just basic grass and some scattered trees. It is a place that just is , and I have always found, sprawled on the ground and looking at the buildings that crowd around it, that it is the perfect place to think.
I am, according to my birth certificate, seventeen today. I don’t know whether or not to believe my birth certificate, though, honestly. Some days I feel that I must be much older than seventeen and that
I don’t ask questions , I think. I never ask questions. Boys turn into monsters while I’m kissing them and the sewing of lace is cause for alarm and the gnomes are getting smarter and breaking into the oven. And I don’t ask questions . I let it all wash over me. Because I’m such a huge coward.
I bring my knees up and wrap my arms around them in the chill of the twilight and press my face into my lap. Kelsey sits next to me, silent and accepting, and I feel better for having her there. And I realize this is what it means to have friends. How perfectly, utterly, beautifully normal.
And maybe Kelsey and I can find our way to normal together. Maybe we’ll find my mother and we’ll find Kelsey’s father. Maybe I’ll learn Ben’s last name, and where he’s from, and why he thinks that my particular brand of normality is the best sort of normality. Maybe together, Kelsey and I will shake up all the boring normal of Boston’s Beacon Hill, all of its unchanging-ness, and have amazing adventures, and we will just change the world .
Or maybe we’ll just find our way to making our own sort of normality.
READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT
Coming June 2014
CHAPTER 1
One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
This is how the story of my birth goes.
My father says my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I always ask how she ended up on his couch. Where did she come from? I ask. Why was she there? Did you know her? My father always looks at me vaguely. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen , he tells me, and then he tells me the story of my name. Selkie , he says. She told me to name you Selkie. And I ask, How did she tell you? And he replies, She etched it into a snowflake, sighed it into a gust of wind, rustled it through the trees of autumn, rippled it over a summer pond.
And my aunts sigh and say, That’s enough .
And when I ask my aunts about my mother, all they will ever say is that she was “flighty.”
When I was little, I used to think maybe my mother would come to take me away. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue aren’t exactly my aunts. They are my dad’s aunts, making them my great-aunts, and therefore old—older than I could pinpoint when I was young. Now that I’m older, I know that they’re older than my dad, but I can’t quite figure out exactly how much older. Dad was their little brother’s only child, I know, but the dates of births in my family are fuzzy. Who wants to remember how old they are? Aunt True asks me. I have never had a birthday party. Or an acknowledgment of my birthday. But I do have a birthday.
It is today.
I am sitting on Boston Common, watching the tourists get lost and the leaves fall, and I am thinking. The Common is the huge park in the middle of Boston. The story I have always been told is that it was originally a cow pasture and that the paved paths meandering through it follow the original cow paths, and I believe that; there is an aimlessness to them. I like that about Boston Common. I like that the place feels like it has no discernible purpose, in this age without cows. It is unnecessary, a frivolity in the middle of the city, prime real estate that isn’t even landscaped , really, is just basic grass and some scattered trees. It is a place that just is , and I have always found, sprawled on the ground and looking at the buildings that crowd around it, that it is the perfect place to think.
I am, according to my birth certificate, seventeen today. I don’t know whether or not to believe my birth certificate, though, honestly. Some days I feel that I must be much older than seventeen and that
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