Her older sister, Sophie, says, Stop, you just hate school, and that is true. Lily hates sixth grade. However, Lily hates other things, too, like parties and kissing games and boys keeping score. Guess what? Sophie says. There were parties in the old days, too.
Sophie is more pragmatic than Lily. Debra says so on the phone late at night. Lily is more anxious, Debra says. Then Lily thinks, Am I? She sits up in bed and strains to hear her mom’s voice downstairs.
“Yeah,” her mom says. “Yeah, I know. Well, she’s upset.”
She’s wrong, though. Lily is not upset. She just wants to live in a castle or a secret cottage in the woods. She is writing a novel about a girl named Ambrose who becomes a swan at night. The novel is in a journal her teacher gave her. It’s a black-and-white composition book for her feelings or whatever she wants to say.
East of the sun and west of the moon lived Princess Ambrose with her mother the Queen, her father the King, and her eleven sisters. She was a regular princess except for one thing. Every night at dusk she turned into a swan.
“How?” Sophie says, but Lily ’s teacher comments in green pen, “Lily, what a wonderful story! Tell me more about the swan.”
“Why is her name Ambrose?” Lily’s dad, Richard, asks when she’s at his house that weekend.
“It’s short for Amber Rose,” Lily explains.
He says, “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Ambrose keeps her wings under her bed and at night she slips them over her shoulders to fly across the sky and gather tiny stars. She pours the stars into the drawer of her nightstand where they sparkle secretly. She loves to look at them—but in the morning she must sit at her loom with her eleven sisters and weave nonstop. Her mother is always telling her, hurry up, work faster.
“Oh, wonderful,” Debra says. “Is that supposed to be me?”
“What are the sisters weaving?” Lily’s teacher asks in green.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 30, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 30, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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GET IT TOGETHER
In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.
GAINING CONTROL
The frenemies who fought to bring contraception to this country.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.
AGAINST THE CURRENT
\"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,\" at Soho Rep, and \"Gatz,\" at the Public.
METAMORPHOSIS
The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.
THE BIG SPIN
A district attorney's office investigates how its prosecutors picked death-penalty juries.
THIS ELECTION JUST PROVES WHAT I ALREADY BELIEVED
I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.
HOLD YOUR TONGUE
Can the world's most populous country protect its languages?
A LONG WAY HOME
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”