PART
ONE
SOPHIE
{before} I
Bianca walks toward me, under too much sky. The white-hot twilight makes a halo out of loose strands of her fine black hair. She looks down and fidgets, as though she’s trying to settle an argument with herself, but then she looks up and sees me and a smile starts in her eyes, then spreads to her mouth. This moment of recognition, the alchemy of being seen, feels so vivid that everything else is an afterimage. By the time she reaches the Boulevard, where I’m standing, Bianca is laughing at some joke that she’s about to share with me.
As the two of us walk back toward campus, a brace of dark quince leaves, hung on doorways in some recent celebration, wafts past our feet. Their nine dried stems scuttle like tiny legs.
* * *
I lie awake in our dark dorm room, listening to Bianca breathe on the shelf across from mine. And then I hear her voice.
“Sophie?”
I’m so startled, hearing her speak after curfew, I tip over and land in a bundle on the floor.
Bianca giggles from her bunk as I massage my sore tailbone. I keep expecting some authority figure, like one of the Proctors, to burst in and glare at us for disturbing the quiet time. If you can’t sleep when everyone else does, you’re not even human.
“Sophie! It’s okay,” Bianca says. “I just wanted to ask you a question. I don’t even remember what it was now.” Then she stops laughing, because she understands this isn’t funny to me. “You’re
not going to get in trouble. I promise. You know, we can’t even learn anything here unless we think for ourselves occasionally, right? Some rule we learned as little kids doesn’t have to keep us in a chokehold forever.”
...
