You’ve got a lot of soul, right?” He smiled at himself as he said it, in that way guys say those fake-sensitive things they think will make a girl’s clothes come flying off.

That didn’t deserve a response, so I said nothing. That meant something, I thought, but I could never remember what. He was one of the main ones, decently hot, with two lines shaved through his eyebrow. One of Sophia’s boys-there were three of them that night, two she might’ve liked plus a hanger-on-sat down next to me. I was a little bit drunk on warm spiked Coke, wondering which kind I’d turn out to be, and feeling so sorry for myself I should’ve been ashamed. Some of them had broken like glass, sharp and glittering, but some had cracked into dusty pieces that the city swept up and away. The only ones who could, Sophia among them, were broken. It was supposed to make me feel less alone, I guess, but instead I was thinking that none of those people, not one, could understand what I was, or what I’d seen, or where I came from. Across the way we could see the geometric glitter of the Financial District, and I was staring at all the little pinprick windows, reminding myself that every light might have a person under it, and every person had a story, and the city was full of people whose lives were nothing like mine.

There was this night when we were down by the water. It made me brave, but it also meant I was just a couple clicks shy of feeling numb, inhuman, and I wanted to fight that feeling away. For a while I’d let her drag me along, because there was a period when I felt like nothing that was of Earth could hurt me. Not just boys, but it was them she’d meet out, on shitty non-dates that mainly involved drinking and walking around. 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.īoys liked Sophia. 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. Wide eyes and a knotty ballerina build and black hair that moved against itself like water weeds. Sophia was an ex-Story like me, another Hinterland reject. She was the only thing that made it interesting. The only thing that made it all bearable was Sophia Snow. 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. 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 was eighteen years old, give or take a fairy-tale century, when I had my first kiss.

Melissa albert the night country