Skylar Dorset: The Girl Who Never Was

But nobody comes dashing across Beacon Street. The piano player outside the entrance to the T plays something tinkling and tuneless. Ben says, 'Happy birthday.'He does not ask me how old I am. I am glad for that. It seems weird to say that I'm seventeen when I feel so much younger than that. Then he says, 'It's the autumnal equinox. You were born on the autumnal equinox.'

'Not really. Well, I don't know. The autumnal equinox is different every year.'

Ben shrugs.

I want to tell him that I would like to find my mother.

I don't.

xx Kelsey is my best friend. She has never been inside my house though. I don't allow anybody inside my house. The air in that house shouldn't be disturbed by outside people. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue wouldn't even know how to address a new person. They have been talking to the same people for centuries it feels like. 'A proper Bostonian never talks to strangers,'they tell me, and their definition of stranger means 'every person on the planet except the four people we know.'Life on Beacon Hill, for a certain type of Bostonian, has not changed in hundreds of years. Sometimes I think it will never change.

But today'today I think maybe change is right around the corner. I feel like even the air I'm breathing feels lighter.

Kelsey is waiting for me on the sidewalk, and I jump over the last two front steps to meet her. This is not really like me, and she lifts her eyebrows.

'I have a good feeling,'I tell her.

She smiles. 'Good. Me too.'Kelsey always has a good feeling when we are about to go on what she considers to be an adventure. Kelsey likes adventures. She would have started looking for her mother ages ago had she been in my position. She adjusts the bag slung over her shoulder and tips her chin in the direction of the Common. 'Let's go,'she says.

My house sits right on Beacon Street, on the very outer edge of the higgledy-piggledy, charm-personified area of

Boston known as Beacon Hill, a place whose very streets were literally designed to try to keep the less desirable element out, set out in a rabbit warren that only those with the right breeding were supposed to know how to navigate. It seems strange to me, quaint, an entire neighborhood built so defensively, as if preparing for an invasion from the rest of the city. Beacon Hill is full of ancient brick townhouses that all hug each other, tipping drunkenly against each other on the unsteady land of a hill that was halved in height at one point so that its dirt could form the rest of the city. My house is no different, with unnecessarily large doors and dramatic, curved walls. Like the very poshest of the Beacon Hill houses, some of the windowpanes are the distinctive lavender that dates back centuries, to a defective shipment of glass once unknowingly used in Boston Brahmin Beacon Hill homes. The panes, months after installation, revealed a tendency to turn lavender in the sun and became the best sort of accidental status symbol. For a little while, there were imitation lavender panes all over Boston, none ever quite managing to duplicate the particular Beacon Hill shade. The fad for imitation eventually fell out of fashion. Now only a few of the originals remain, and tourists walk up and down the busy and chaotic thoroughfare of Beacon Street, almost getting hit by cars as they dart into traffic to get a better angle on our front windows. I feel sometimes like I live in a museum from the number of people constantly loitering around my front stoop.

We glance left and right before crossing Beacon Street, but without much interest: Boston pedestrians walk protected by the confidence that motorists would rather stop than face the lawsuit if they killed you. Once across the two lanes of traffic, we are directly on the Common. It is no surprise I considered it my front yard when I was growing up and no surprise that we have no outdoor area to our home. Why would you need one with so many empty acres right in front of you, kindly maintained by the city? My aunts have beautiful window boxes'another Beacon Hill necessity'but that is their only concession to nature. And they don't even take care of them, hiring out their care to gardeners. 'Our kind does not garden,'my aunts always say, ever the proper Bostonians.

Kelsey and I walk through the Common to the T station. It's windy, as usual, and Kelsey's hair is whipping in front of her face.

She sighs, pushing hair out of her mouth. 'I should have thought to bring an elastic.'

'Oh,'I say and pull a rubber band out of my pocket and hand it to her.

'How clean is it?'she asks dubiously.

'I found it in with my aunts'yarn the other day,'I assure her.

'I don't know what I would do without you,'remarks Kelsey. 'It's like having my own personal genie. If I didn't have you, I'd have to, like, remember things on my own.'

I don't bother to say anything. I can't help the habit I have

of pocketing random things, and lots of times it comes in handy, like now.

Kelsey takes the rubber band and pulls her blond hair briskly back into a ponytail.

I look around for Ben, but I don't see him. I almost never see Ben when I'm not alone. Sometimes I wonder if he hides from me. Sometimes I wonder if he's a figment of my imagination. I've never told anyone about Ben, not even Kelsey. It's weird. For all I consider Kelsey my best friend, there's so much about my life I feel I can't tell her'can't tell anyone. My antiquated aunts in their time-frozen home seem too rarefied to be discussed with Kelsey, who exists for me in such a normal world. These are the worlds I straddle'home and high school'and it's hard for me to get the two to intersect. Football games and study hall and prom'I can't fit them into the other pieces of my life. And Ben exists in still another world, a world all his own for me, neither school nor home but a special slice of life. I could tell Kelsey about him, but somehow I feel like he would be less mine then. Which is both silly and selfish, but I can't help it. I have never told Kelsey about Ben, and I don't mention him now.

We get to the Park Street subway station. The T worker keeping guard at the turnstile frowns at us, so I make sure to make a big show of swiping my card. The T is always freaking out about non-paying riders. Sometimes they're so strident, you'd think they were fighting a war or something.

'And they'll just let you look up information about your

mother?'Kelsey asks me as we head toward the Red Line platform. The Red Line will take us into Dorchester, where the Registry of Vital Records is, the object of our mission today. I am determined to learn everything I can about my mother. I've asked Kelsey along because I don't want to be alone, and Kelsey is always game for an outing.

Someone steps in front of me, and I have to concentrate on darting around them. This is always happening at Park Street. There are always too many tourists around, all of them lost, all of them wandering around so confusingly aimlessly that they seem to pop up out of nowhere. Walking through Park Street station requires as much concentration as driving a car.

'Well,'I reply, having completed my darting maneuver. 'They're public records. Why shouldn't I be allowed to see them?'

'I don't know,'she says. 'If it was this easy, why didn't you ever do it before?'

Frankly, sometimes even I can barely understand my motives for the things I do. This used to frighten my aunts. I learned to cover whenever I found myself doing something inexplicable, like dancing to nonexistent music in my room or trying to read the language of dust motes. This is probably why I haven't mentioned to them my latest determination to find my mother. Well, that and the fact that my aunts obviously didn't like my mother.

To Kelsey I say, 'I don't know. I'm seventeen now. I guess it's time.'

'Seventeen?'exclaims Kelsey in delight. 'Did you have a birthday? You should have told me! We could have celebrated!'