SNEAK PEEK - The Girl Who Never Was

The Girl Who Never Was

Author’s Note: I hope you enjoy this sneak peek at my new novel The Girl Who Never Was. Thanks for reading – please vote, comment and like! The complete book is being published in June 2014 by Sourcebooks Fire. I’m also going to be posting a prequel novella, The Girl Who Kissed a Lie, over the next couple weeks right here on Wattpad. You can visit  www.skylardorset.com for more information!

Chapter One

One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to an insane asylum.

This is how the story of my birth goes.

My father says my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I always ask how she ended up on his couch. Where did she come from? I ask. Why was she there? Did you know her? My father always looks at me vaguely. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, he tells me, and then he tells me the story of my name. Selkie, he says. She told me to name you Selkie. And I ask, How did she tell you? And he replies, She etched it into a snowflake, sighed it into a gust of wind, rustled it through the trees of autumn, rippled it over a summer pond.

And my aunts sigh and say, That’s enough.

And when I ask my aunts about my mother, all they will ever say is that she was “flighty.”

When I was little, I used to think maybe my mother would come to take me away. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue aren’t exactly my aunts. They are my dad’s aunts, making them my great-aunts, and therefore old—older than I could pinpoint when I was young. Now that I’m older, I know that they’re older than my dad, but I can’t quite figure out exactly how much older. Dad was their little brother’s only child, I know, but the dates of births in my family are fuzzy. Who wants to remember how old they are? Aunt True asks me. I have never had a birthday party. Or an acknowledgment of my birthday. But I do have a birthday.

It is today.

I am sitting on Boston Common, watching the tourists get lost and the leaves fall, and I am thinking. The Common is the huge park in the middle of Boston. The story I have always been told is that it was originally a cow pasture and that the paved paths meandering through it follow the original cow paths, and I believe that; there is an aimlessness to them. I like that about Boston Common. I like that the place feels like it has no discernible purpose, in this age without cows. It is unnecessary, a frivolity in the middle of the city, prime real estate that isn’t even landscaped, really, is just basic grass and some scattered trees. It is a place that just is, and I have always found, sprawled on the ground and looking at the buildings that crowd around it, that it is the perfect place to think.

I am, according to my birth certificate, seventeen today. I don’t know whether or not to believe my birth certificate, though, honestly. Some days I feel that I must be much older than seventeen and that somebody got it all wrong: my addle-minded father or my aunts who don’t keep track of dates. And some days I feel much younger than seventeen, like a small child, and I just want my mother.

I feel that way now.

I am thinking of my mother, of how I am told I resemble her. I have never seen her photograph, so all I can do is study myself in the mirror and draw conclusions from there. Tall, I suppose, the way I am tall. Slender the way I am slender. It must be from her that I get my pale skin that resists all of my efforts to get it to tan, since my aunts and father have naturally olive complexions. It must be from her that I get my blue eyes, my blond hair so light that it can be white in certain lights. I wear my hair long, and I wonder if my mother did—if she does still, wherever she is.