The girl shook her head.

  “I wish—I wish I’d never found it.” Mama’s voice dropped; it wasn’t clear if she meant to be heard or not. “I wish it didn’t hurt so much. I wish we’d never been discovered.” Her breath was a tight gasp. “I wish Ted had never found us, but oh, I’m so happy he did. For you.”

  “Mama?”

  Mama turned and pressed her hands hard against the curve of the girl’s face. “I love you,” Mama said, bending to place a fast kiss in the center of her forehead. She smoothed her thumbs across the girl’s cheekbones. “I have loved every minute with you.”

  The girl was bewildered. “I love you, too,” she answered breathlessly, confusion taking the space of air in her body. “What’s happening? What’s going to happen?”

  “I am so sorry, baby,” Mama said. “I am so sorry.”

  Ted knocked on the door, saying something that the door held back.

  Mama unwound the jet beads from her neck, pushing them into the girl’s hands. “Remember,” she said. “Remember I love you.”

  The knocking was louder now. Ted’s voice was impatient.

  The girl felt the unyielding shape of the beads against her skin, her palms, her thin fingers. A shudder started in her knees and she said, “Mama, please.” She wasn’t sure what she was asking, just that she needed to put words into the space between her body and her mother’s. “Mama, don’t.”

  “I have the best daughter in the world,” her mother said, tearing her earrings from her ears and pulling her shirt out of the wide belt of her skirt, “the best and most wonderful child I could have ever asked for. I have lived a good life; I have seen amazing places, and it has been the best adventure to share those places with you. And I love you. I love you.”

  Mama was nearly naked—just her slip was left, covering her bra and panties, as if she knew the girl didn’t want to see that last stretch of skin. Rosewater scented the air, and the air felt sticky with promises and secrets.

  “Mama,” said the girl again, hating the rough note in her voice.

  Mama opened her fingers on the thing she had brought back from Nana Nancy’s house. Her eyes met the girl’s, the dark liquid of her irises swimming suddenly with shadows and branches, and then the glossy thing was up over her head and her bright eyes were gone. Ted crashed through the bedroom door, splinters falling onto the carpet and a noise like a train whistle rushing out from his body. “Lianne!” he cried, voice cracking like glass, and the beautiful black bird before them flapped once, twice, and disappeared out the open bedroom window.

  vi

  She remembers all of this. She remembers the unicorns, their hooves protected by little skirts of hair, their mouths downturned. She remembers their eyes, wild and mocking, which seemed to know her the second time she came to visit. She remembers the Spanish arch, torn from its home and brought across the world to be an example to schoolchildren and art historians. She remembers the fruit trees, planted to human design, pruned and shaped for the benefit of the gardeners. And she remembers her mother, beautiful and glossy, free until she wasn’t, untethered until the cage was shut around her.

  Nana Nancy didn’t live long after that. She fell in her garden and never came home from the hospital. The EMTs said that when they got to her, they found two glossy black feathers near her feet. Ted refused to take them. And the girl couldn’t bring herself to touch them.

  Ted bought a black suit for the funeral and a black dress for the girl. She wore her mother’s jet beads to the cemetery and threw a single skinny rose onto the dirt over the casket.

  “Well,” Ted said, hands deep in the pockets of his stiff suit, and they watched as people slowly made their way out of the cemetery. Everyone had driven, and the line of black cars stretched bleakly to the gates. Ted said it was the way his family had always done it: no one ever walked if they could drive somewhere.

  “Will I still go to school here?” the girl asked, because she hadn’t known what else to say. Her mother had never mentioned boarding school, but she knew it was a thing that existed in Nana Nancy’s world and, therefore, in Ted’s.

  Ted drew her to his side, dropping a long arm around her shoulders. “Yeah,” he said roughly, his voice a small fire in the gloom. “And we’ll visit museums whenever we can. She would’ve liked that.”

  They never needed to say who she was.

  They traveled in Ted’s reliable sedan, or bought tickets for the train or airplane. She tucked vials of rosewater into her backpack, pouring them into sweetened boiling water and, later, when Ted said she was old enough, into her morning coffee. Something eased inside her with every sip, something she hadn’t realized was clenched and tense.

  Ted watched her drink, his mouth curling gently at the sides; he said she reminded him so much of her mother, even though her height was coming in, and they told each other stories of how she lit up rooms and stages and sidewalks. “She was here, wasn’t she?” he asked her once, when he was tired from a long day’s drive, almost stumbling when they finally made it home. “I didn’t imagine her?”

  They went to see the McNay, the Getty, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One summer, they spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., visiting all the national museums and memorials. She liked the still exactness of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings, especially the one of Christina in the meadow, looking toward a farmhouse with her face turned away from the viewer. They traveled to Pennsylvania and Maine to see Wyeth’s studios and the paintings on permanent exhibition. Ted wanted her to “contextualize” his work, and they went to exhibits of N. C. Wyeth’s paintings in New York and Massachusetts and North Carolina; he wanted her to see how the son took what the father taught him and turned it into something new, something of his very own, and how his own son did the same. They ambled through famous and lesser-known museums, tracing light and shadow and reading plaques posted on chalk-gray walls.

  She knew what he was doing, and she loved him for it. He was giving her reasons to stay, finding her beautiful things to feed her starving heart.

  Ted never minded when she sat for hours in museums, sketching. He hung her paintings throughout their house. When she said she wanted to draw a mural on her bedroom wall, he nodded; a week later, there were paints and brushes waiting. After he saw her design of roses and wings, he gave her a book on historic rose cultivation and offered to help her plant a garden.

  She knew he meant well, but her designs weren’t rooted in the world around her. They came from the stories her mother had told, from the faces of the cards she didn’t quite dare to pull for herself, and from the shapes woven into the tapestries she remembered seeing so long ago.

  On her thirteenth birthday, Ted watched as she unwrapped her last gift. It was the crane figurine from Nana Nancy’s house—the expensive Lladró she had almost broken that last day. Her startled eyes met Ted’s; he smiled at her and said, “She would have wanted you to have it.”

  Later, when she knew he was out of the house, she crept outside and smashed the figurine into shards with a hammer and, when that wasn’t enough, stomped them to dust.

  Ted promised her a trip to Spain and France for her high school graduation, a chance to visit the museums there. “And the churches,” she murmured, thinking of the stone museum at the top of Manhattan. What would it be like to see those walls in the places they had been meant for? Would it help her feel settled, or would it just be another stone wall?

  She did not ask Ted these questions.

  They never spoke about the thing her mother had found or how she had left. The only time they came close was a bright spring Sunday, when she was sketching a swan and worrying over the arch of its tender neck. “She lived longer than anyone expected,” Ted said from the doorway, and for a scalding moment the girl thought he meant her mother. “It was something of a miracle.”

  She was fifteen when they did a unit on mythology in her English class, reading about men who turned themselves into monsters to conquer the world and women who became beasts to avoid their men. She gave Ted a draft of one of her papers, and he brought it to breakfast, his cheeks drawn and eyebrows low. “This is a good paper,” he told her, watching her sip at her rosewater coffee, “but the books never tell you what’s true. She didn’t become a monster, you know. All she did was leave everything monstrous behind.”

  The girl promised herself to never fabricate reasons for why her mother chose to leave her: she already knew the most important one. Being trapped inside the wrong skin can feel like a curse. The moment you find the right one, you can’t wait to live in it.

  But knowing something does not mean making peace with it, and she ached deep in her bones.

  At a party when she is sixteen, West Benson pulls her aside and tells her she is the prettiest girl out of all the girls there, or at least the prettiest one not wearing makeup. His hand is slick and insistent against her skin.

  Later, once he has taught her that her body is filled with holes, she finds herself shaking in front of an open window, looking up at a sky dark as feathers, dark as an unhealed heart. The air smells like rosewater and salt. She can’t get warm.

  “What,” says West Benson, his voice thick with something she doesn’t like and has never liked. “You wanted it.”

  She doesn’t turn. Her mind is full of stones and fruit and creatures in pens.

  She hears the clink of a belt buckle fastening, and then West Benson is standing behind her and breathing hard on her shoulder. “Huh,” he says, and reaches out. There’s a black feather on the windowsill.

  She slaps his hand away. “That’s mine,” she says.

  She can hear his pout, even though she doesn’t turn her head.

  She thinks of the unicorns, of hunters, stone archways stolen and moved across oceans, ripe fruit waiting for someone else to come pluck it. She thinks of de Kooning, erasing his women in order to draw and redraw them. Picasso pointing women toward and away from each other, their individual bodies misaligned. And Wyeth, who gave Christina a canvas but hid her face. She thinks of bodies that exist as prey instead of promises, of girls who see unicorns until they can’t anymore. She thinks of her mother, who said the body was a cage and who colored hers in with paints and clothes. She thinks of the last card she watched her mother pull, the night before she disappeared: Courage. And she thinks of West, with his clammy words and sharp hands, who would have carried a spear and attacked stone churches and turned Christina around to face him, and only him.

  She thinks of all the ways there are to give up.

  She thinks of all the ways there are to escape.

  Inside her ribs, her heart thuds. She feels too many places on her body where her skin has failed to provide cover. She aches for a sip of rosewater, for something to ease the hurt that gathers inside her bones. Her shoulders flex; for a moment, she thinks she has wings.

  In her fingers, the feather stretches into a cuff, something that can be tied around a wrist or a waist or a neck.

  She thinks of all the ways that giving up and escaping are the same, and all the ways they are each other’s opposite. In her mind, she shuffles a deck of cards and pulls the ones she needs. Grief. Deception. Courage.

  “Here,” she says, and throws the glossy thing at West Benson’s face.

  vii

  Later, when the party is over and she is back home and there is a shrieking turkey out in the front yard and West Benson’s parents are calling around to find their son, she says what she says about her mother: “Yes, he was there. He was until he wasn’t.”

  Ted, bewildered, will wonder aloud what to do about the turkey. She will tell him to keep one feather, and then shoo the bird away.

  One day, perhaps, she will want the feather for herself.

  Author’s Note

  I’ve long been unnerved by selkie tales, as the stories seem to strip the selkie of any agency: either she’s trapped by the person who has stolen her skin, or she’s compelled to return to the sea the moment she finds her pelt. Neither of these actions is based on a decision she makes—and that strikes me as a terrible and lonely gap in the tradition. When I started writing FLIGHT, I intended to write a selkie story where the selkie finally got to make her own decisions. But I found I was more concerned with how she decided to act: What moments and memories did she draw on to make her choices? Who did she look to as she learned how to be herself? As I wrote, she slipped from seal to bird, from water to air. She remembered how to breathe, and she is learning how to fly.

  Character Connection in FLIGHT

  by Nova Ren Suma

  What keeps you reading a story? What makes you care enough to believe in the otherwise unimaginable and stay committed to the last word? FLIGHT offers us an answer. The story may whirl through cavernous museums and scattered cities, imaginative and mysterious, but the magic is tied to the characters who command this story’s glorious, beating heart: Mama and the daughter she ultimately leaves behind, called “the girl.” How is it possible to form a bond with a character who is kept unnamed, and to feel the gaping wound the girl must feel as Mama takes to the window? It’s because we’ve come to understand the girl’s longing. The story has allowed us to feel the girl’s desires and the weight of her unanswered questions.

  The story introduces this right away, when Mama takes the girl to see the unicorn tapestries and, in the reverent hush at the museum, reveals a taste of secrets that must stay hidden. It’s here that Mama offers up the first piece of a puzzle: She cryptically tells the girl to remember the unicorns but is unable or unwilling to say why. Don’t forget: “the magic was in remembering the unicorn, not owning it.” Each scene that follows elevates the mystery. We empathize with the girl because we seek the same answers she does. Don’t we want to know why Mama is so concerned with creatures who cannot be caged?

  Like the mythical unicorn, like the selkie that inspired this unique story reinvention, Mama is the perfect enigma—a character we cannot know, not fully, not ever, even as she lights up the corners of our imaginations. When Mama is gone, the girl must live with what she’s learned, what she’s lost, and what it means for her future.

  Once a character comes to life in my mind, seeming alive because I understand and feel their desires, I’ll never be able to let go. We may have assumed this was a story focused on the mystery of Mama, but in the end, the mysteries point inward: In the final moments of the story, the girl is at last able to recognize herself.

  No matter the extraordinary worlds a story may travel, when we’re connected to a character’s inner desires, we’re more likely to become deeply invested—all the more so because of the strange creatures revealed under their skins.

  Risk

  Rachel Hylton

  “RISK is a jaw-dropping, powerful story of transformation. I raced through it on the first read, stunned by Rachel Hylton’s imagination. The second time I read it slowly, savoring the plot twists and the brilliant language. You’re going to love this one!”

  —Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Shout

  We, the sophomore girls of Carol Moseley Braun High School, would like to set the record straight.

  We were there for Marnie Vega long before she became a lobster.

  You think that we are interchangeable, that we are two-faced and faceless, that we don’t say what we mean and you can’t understand us anyway. You can’t distinguish what makes a girl in from what makes a girl out. But Marnie was in, okay? She was one of us. We were there for her in seventh grade when her dad kept getting deployed, like, over and over. We would crowd onto her twin bed and play songs from before Taylor Swift got bangs and flip through the book her dad sent her of pictures of Korean shrines, brightly colored against red leaves. “It looks so calm,” Marnie would say to us. “Don’t you think it looks so calm? Don’t you think it’s probably so calm there?”

  And we were there in eighth grade when she got her first period during first period. One of us ran to her locker for gym shorts. One of us handed her tampons under the stall door. One of us sat cross-legged on the counter and coached her—at least until she refused to try, removed the applicator, and pushed it in like an o.b.

  We were at Lara’s birthday party, too, on the night Marnie wasn’t in the group photo. During Ghost in the Graveyard she hid on that side of Lara’s house, the one with all the serial killer bushes, so of course we didn’t search there. Did we realize when we lined up for the photo that we hadn’t found her? Did she realize we hadn’t searched? Does it matter? She probably just hid there for attention.

  If we noticed her slip in, eyes downturned, just in time for cake, we didn’t comment. We forgave her. We reabsorbed her.

  And she didn’t turn into a lobster, no matter what Evan Brockwell says. There was no changing. At the exact moment in Math II when he turned around and said, “Hey, Marn, wanna graph my natural log?” Marnie just was a lobster. She held up a huge claw—beetle-black with an iridescent wetness of purple and teal to it, like fresh nail polish. She said, in that dreamy Marnie way, “You want me to what?” and she shut it with a snap.

  Nobody was scared—well, Evan went green, but nobody else. The lobster was just so obviously Marnie. After class, we gathered around her in the hall. Her eyes were all pupil; her mouth had no lips, just little arms that clenched and unclenched over a hole. After that first thing she said to Evan, all her words came out in a rattle, not like human speech at all. Marnie, she said. Marnie. Her own name, over and over. She held up her claws and opened and closed them.

  We told her no one would notice. We tried not to look at the stems that held her eyes onto her head.

  “Marnie, Marnie Vega.” We parted for Slidell Williams. Sly was basketball All-Conference and baseball All-State and the editor of the paper, all in one. He had a tight Afro and gray eyes, and he was a junior. And Marnie, like the rest of us, had wanted him. And Marnie, like the rest of us, had walked the halls with hair dipping into her face, mouthing Hey, Sly to the floor because she was afraid to say it out loud.