Chapter 1
Alison Morris was seven years old when she experienced her first taste of shame. Not the manufactured kind imposed by grownups through lectures or scoldings, but an unfiltered, existential shame that hollowed her out in a way she would never quite manage to explain.
At school, the classroom had fallen into its usual morning rhythm, pencils scratching, pages turning, when a sharp thud cut through everything. Twenty small heads snapped up in unison, eyes darting from face to face until someone whispered, “Outside.”
Chairs scraped against linoleum as the children crowded behind their teacher toward the garden door. There on the concrete lay a bird, its rust-colored feathers still glossy in the sunlight, its small body perfectly still.
A happy wren had crashed into the glass walls of the corridor they used to go down to the cafeteria. Now she was just a wren, she wasn’t happy anymore.
Nobody was.
The teacher had a sad expression in her eyes but remained essentially impassive when she explained that unfortunately, that was not the first time such a tragic incident had occurred.
“But why?” someone asked.
The response was blunt and matter-of-fact: birds were unable to recognize glass.
The children were left to contemplate the corpse, the silence growing heavier as they considered that the only thing sadder than a bird flying into a window was the fact that nothing would change as a result.
They held a makeshift funeral. The burial took place under a cherry tree that had been planted years ago by previous students, and Alison couldn’t help but feel envious of those children-now-turned-adults, as their legacy was marked by the beautiful tree in the garden. While all she and her classmates had left so far was the lifeless body of a little bird.
For the rest of her time at that school, she couldn’t walk through the corridor without picturing the violence of that moment.
The feeling never really went away. The world was designed for certain kinds of creatures, and anything that didn’t fit was bound, sooner or later, to collide with something invisible and fatal.
It was a point of view that left Alison less frightened of death and more suspicious of the living, especially those who insisted that everything was as it should be.
Years later, as she rode the city bus toward her new school, Alison studied the landscape through the safety glass of her window and felt the old shame resurface. The bus rattled past overgrown lots and strip malls, each intersection more anonymous than the last.
She tried to imagine the wren’s point of view. Maybe the bird had seen its reflection and thought it was meeting a friend. Or maybe it had been so focused on the horizon beyond that it never registered the barrier until it was too late. Either way, the end result was the same: a sudden interruption, a minor tragedy rendered invisible by routine.
Her attention drifted to the crumpled envelope in her lap, addressed in Olivia Heart’s familiar, exuberant scrawl. She smoothed the paper out with the flat of her palm and reread the letter for the third time that morning, savoring each line as though it might contain some secret code to surviving the year ahead.
“August 16, 20XX
Dear Lizzie,
Your letter arrived just in time. I was drowning in Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldmund” and absolutely needed rescue. You saved me.
Summer’s been electric here. New faces every weekend, bonfires at the canal, midnight swims, and my mother’s ongoing campaign to get me home before two a.m. She’s losing, for the record. Also: I pierced my nose. I think you’d approve.
The calendar’s becoming my enemy. Thirty days (I refuse to say ‘one month’) until we’re prisoners of education again.
God, I’ll miss seeing your face every morning. But you’ll thrive at the new school. Those Eminent Institute zombies never deserved you anyway.
Oh! And Philip Young awaits. I don’t know much about him, but he seems like your type of weirdo :)
Love, O.”
Alison traced Olivia’s looping signature, a pink O shaped like a spiral galaxy, and smiled at the idea of meeting Philip Young.
