The Night Country

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I was eighteen years old, give or take a fairy-tale century, when I had my first kiss.

I was in my senior year at a school in Brooklyn, where I’d enrolled not long after two twisted-up years in the Hinterland. I craved normal, I craved routine. I had, to be honest, this image of myself wearing a leaf-colored sweater and studying in a wood-paneled library, which was embarrassing to think about later, when I was reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter beneath our underfunded high school’s flickering fluorescents. The only thing that made it all bearable was Sophia Snow.

Maybe bearable isn’t the right word. She was the only thing that made it interesting. Unnerving is another way to put it.

Sophia was an ex-Story like me, another Hinterland reject. Wide eyes and a knotty ballerina build and black hair that moved against itself like water weeds. She had one of those hologram faces, different from every angle, the kind you want to stare at till you’ve uncovered all its secrets. And by the time you’ve figured out you never will, she’s stolen your wallet from your pocket and your watch off your wrist.

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