Every week, the Hinterland’s refugees gathered in the psychic’s parlor to talk. Drink coffee. Settle grievances. It was a last stop before prison or an institution for lots of them. The violent ones, the Briar Kings, were already gone. Faded into the crowd, burying themselves where they could do the most damage, or dead. When a world dies, it doesn’t go with a whimper. I felt like an outsider there, too, but then we all did. I’d sat at enough misfit lunch tables in my life to know the feeling. We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.
I stocked oats and pecans and lucuma powder at the co-op, and tried to stay in my own bed the whole night. I read books that helped pave over the chinks and canyons in my memory, and let Ella comb henna through my hair. On Sundays I drank bad coffee and listened to the refugees’ stories, and they started to fill me up. My memories became denser. I was building a scaffolding out of them to hang a real life on.
With a girl whose fairy tale had been so dark I didn’t see how she could be anything less than a sociopath, I made a pact: we’d go to school. Her for the first time, me again. By then the group had someone at work forging documents for anyone who needed them. My friend became Sophia Snow, a fairy-tale name I tried to talk her out of. I went with Alice Proserpine, and moved my birthday two years up. I wanted to be seventeen on the record.
The doors to the Hinterland were closed, the world winked out. The ice was out of me. The Spinner’s world had set Finch loose, too. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I pictured him journeying through starry spaces and dusty doors, strange universes he could sift through like coffee beans.
Sometimes after those restless nights, I wake up early in the morning, woozy with dark dreams. I check my reflection in the mirror. I slide on sunglasses before Ella wakes up, and I go walking. I drink scalding tea and ride the ferry and breathe hard into my hands. When I come home again, my eyes are brown, and faultless, and you could almost, almost say they look like my mother’s. Ella Proserpine’s.