Girl Who Never Was

by Skylar Dorset

  So I sit down and eat dinner.

  ***

  It is that night, after dinner, almost bedtime, when I am trying and failing to do homework, that I make the connection that I should have made so much earlier. Benedict, my father had said, and I finally think of Ben. I had always assumed his name was Benjamin, but had he ever said that? No. He has always just been Ben. I don’t even know his last name. Benedict Le Fay. Who I told my birth date to. The only person I’ve ever told.

  It doesn’t make sense to me, any of it. How can Ben be involved? And what, exactly, is Ben involved with? There are so many odd things going on. Could he be connected to my mother? But how? When no one else in the universe seems to be? I think of the vandalized pages in the pocket of my sweatshirt—Stewarts throughout Boston history. Could Ben have something to do with that? Ben, who is as inextricably a part of Boston to me as the Common itself?

  I look out my bedroom window. The Common’s lazy paths are signaled to me by rows of lights along them, leading eventually to the brighter corner where Park Street T station sits. I stand there, torn. Is it madness to go look for Ben now? He is probably not there, not this late, but I feel compelled by the same need to find out something concrete that drove me to visit my father. My aunts don’t want me to know, but I have to know. How am I supposed to make any decisions about my future when I know nothing at all about my past? When I don’t really know who I am?

  I make the decision. No harm in running down there. My aunts think I’m in bed. They won’t think to look for me; they won’t notice I’m gone. Anyway, they’re in bed by now too.

  I pull on my sweatshirt, check its pocket, all the strange things I’m randomly carrying around because I’m insane: pages ripped from old books, check; shard of glass wrapped in tissue, check. Then I slip past the grandfather clock on the landing—it chimes 6:15 as I pass—down to the front hall and out of the house.

  I walk briskly down to Park Street. It is a damp, chilly night. The air feels saturated with rain. I don’t expect Ben to be out on a night like this, but he is there, just out of the circle of light from Park Street, standing on the grass. He is wearing jeans and a windbreaker, sweatshirt, and raincoat, and none of them match—bright orange sweatshirt, bright blue windbreaker, Kelly green raincoat, the colors clash and run together, and that is also not unusual for Ben. He is, however, without anything to sell, which is highly unusual for Ben. He is standing, the collar of his raincoat turned up against the rain in the air, hood over his head, his hands tucked into the pockets of his windbreaker, and he watches me approach, his eyes never leaving me. In this half-light, those distinctive eyes of his are the color of the rain beginning to fall around us, quicksilver, hinting flashes.

  I walk over to him, but once there, I don’t know what to say, how to begin. What do you know about my mother? What do you know about me?

  Ben looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable, and I look back, and he talks first. “Don’t say my name.”

  The only name he has ever told me is Ben, but I know that’s not what he’s talking about, and that makes me furious suddenly. Ben clearly knows so much more about me than he has ever let on, than I have ever told him, and I still know nothing about him. He doesn’t even want me to know his name.

  “Benedict Le Fay?” I ask scathingly. “That name?”

  Ben winces like I’d reached out and slapped him, which is so overdramatic. All I did was snap his name.

  “So that’s your name, is it? A name you never told me? How do you know I know it now? Are you in constant contact with my father’s nurses? And how does my father know your name, anyway? How do you know my father? Why does my father get to know your name and not me?” The questions trip out of my mouth in a tidal wave. Now that I’ve started asking things, I think I might never stop.

  “Okay,” says Ben, his eyes flickering around us as if he’s scared I’m making a scene, attracting attention. “You clearly have a lot of questions, and you deserve answers—”

  “I deserve answers?” Something about the phrase makes me even more furious than I already was, like the truth about my entire life is a treat he’s giving me, a reward for good behavior. “How nice of you.” My voice is dripping sarcasm. “Exactly how much do you know about me, Benedict Le Fay?” I fling his name at him, the only thing I’ve managed to learn about him.

  He hisses in a breath. “Stop that,” he commands harshly. “You need to stop that.”

  I am so sick of being ordered around. “Stop what? Saying your name? What is the big deal? I know one thing about you. Benedict Le Fay, Benedict Le Fay, Benedict Le Fay.”

  Ben staggers away from me as if I’d shoved him, although I haven’t touched him. For the first time, confusion begins to thread through my anger. This upsets him that much?

  “Benedict Le Fay,” I say again, curious now.

  Ben seems to gather himself enough to lunge forward and grab my shoulders unexpectedly, the motion making his hood fall away from his head.

  I gasp in surprise.

  “Stop saying it like that. Please. Where did you learn that? You’re going to—”

  The skies above us open up suddenly, drowning out whatever he was going to say. He groans and drops my shoulders, hastily pulling his hood up again.

  I feel so battered by strangeness I’m exhausted. “You need to tell me what’s going on, Ben.”

  “Fine,” he agrees. “Yes. But not here. We can’t stay here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, annoyed.

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “I’m not,” I repeat very deliberately, “going anywhere. You’re going to tell me what’s going on. Right now.”

  “I can’t,” he snaps. “You said my name. Several times. Not nicely. And now it’s pouring and I’m wet. So we do not have a choice. We are going. If we stay here, the world will end.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you start making sense,” I insist.

  “Selkie,” he bites out, “I am the only thing that has ever made your life make sense. Do you trust me?”

  I hesitate. Only hours earlier, I would have said yes unequivocally. I study Ben’s pale eyes, but I might as well try to interpret the mood of the puddles growing around us. “I don’t know,” I admit.

  “Good answer,” says Ben cryptically, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. “But I need you to now, just for a minute more, just the way you usually do, and come with me.”

  I search his face, his well-known features, the well-defined slope of his cheeks, the elegant curve of lips that I have given far too much thought to. I look over my shoulder. Beacon Street is nothing more than a row of impressionistic lights, looking very far away and unattainable to me.

  “Please come,” Ben begs me.

  I look back at him.

  “Please come now,” he says. He is looking anxiously around him, and he is coiled up, poised to spring. “Please. I will explain everything to you, but there isn’t time right now. We have to go.” He looks back at me, pleading with me, and I realize that, up until this moment, Ben has never asked me for anything. I am still angry, but I am also struck by his nervous determination, so unlike him; he is normally so unflappable.

  “Where?”

  “The subway station,” he says.

  It sounds safe enough, I figure. It’s late, but there are still people in the subway, and it’s only a few feet away. “Okay,” I say.

  “Thank you,” says Ben, heartfelt, and then he takes my hand, dashing to the cover the station represents. The raindrops are hard as they hit the cement, tiny explosions that reverberate and soak the cuffs of my jeans as I am pulled in Ben’s wake, and then he tumbles through the station doors, pulling me after him, and he slams them shut behind us, and every single person around us in Park Street station, the people going in and out, the people going up and down, a
ll vanish into thin air. The silence that falls is terrifying in this space that is made for the noise and bustle of a city.

  I stare around myself in shock because there were people there; they were everywhere.

  “Well,” says Ben, and I realize that he is breathing much harder than the quick dash through the rain should have warranted. “We just made that. Let’s not do that again in the future if we can avoid it.”

  I look at him, leaning against the door. “What have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything. You did it. You said my name. A lot.”

  “And that made all the people in Park Street station disappear?”

  “All the people in Boston,” he corrects me, and he steps carefully away from the door. “If you open this door, we will be pulled out into the Nowhere, do you understand me? You cannot open the door. But you can look through the window.”

  I walk to the door, and I realize that Ben is standing very tensely, as if he expects me to throw the door open and that somehow we will be pulled out into some place called Nowhere and that will be very bad. I don’t pull the door open. I put my face to the window. Outside is nothing but darkness. It is not just that the lights have gone out in Boston. It’s that there are no lights to go out. There is nothing.

  I step back in alarm. “I don’t understand. Where did it go?”

  “You broke my enchantment,” says Ben simply, as if that makes sense.

  I stare at him. “I what?”

  “You broke my enchantment. You said my name, and you made it rain, and you broke it. And really I’m never going to hear the end of it, I must say.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demand, bewildered. “I didn’t make it rain. I can’t make it rain.”

  “Of course you can,” Ben says, as if I am the crazy one.

  “You’re not making any sense.” I am losing patience now. “Nobody has made any sense—”

  “Ever in your life. You’re just noticing it now.”

  “Ben,” I say firmly, ignoring his flinch. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “What’s happening right now? What we’d been waiting for, I suppose, although I didn’t think it would happen quite this way. But you told me your birthday—that was the first break in the chain.” Ben starts pacing, shaking rainwater out of his thick, dark hair with his hands, the droplets flying everywhere. “Then you got into the Salem Which Museum, and Will gave you the books, and you started asking the right questions finally, and it was only a matter of time until you knew the right words, but I thought we’d be able to tell you everything very calmly. I think your aunts were planning an old-fashioned tea or something. I didn’t think you’d be able to dissolve my enchantment. That’s usually so much harder to do than you made it look just now.”

  “What are you talking about? Your enchantment?”

  “Yes. You know. Your whole life and the way you were just normal enough to stay hidden and safe.”

  I stare at him, thinking he’s lost his mind. “You’re telling me that my whole life is nothing but an enchantment?”

  Ben stops pacing and looks at me, quicksilver eyes serious. “Yes,” he answers simply. “And you just broke it.”

  I continue to stare at him, silent, trying to comprehend this.

  “I told you the world would end if you kept saying my name,” says Ben.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Let’s go,” says Ben, as if it’s a typical evening out in Boston. He starts jogging down the stairs at Park Street, toward the subway.

  “Wait. I don’t understand,” I say. I am tired of saying this, and I don’t even think Ben hears me saying it anymore, if he ever did. I decide to avoid the doors with their terrifying black emptiness beyond and follow him. He leaps over the barrier. I halt, pull my T pass out of my pocket, and swipe the card. It beeps its approval, and the gates swing open.

  Ben, who had been leaning over and frowning down the Green Line track to our left, turns at the noise, and he looks absolutely astonished. “Did you just pay to get in here?”

  “Well, it’s an unlimited pass,” I say, “so, technically, I paid at the beginning of the month. What happened to everyone in my life? My father, my aunts, Kelsey?”

  Ben looks blank. “What do you mean?”

  “Were they all just figments of my imagination?”

  “Of course not. They all exist. Everything you knew exists. It was just the perceived normalcy of you that was enchanted. I mean, who has the energy to enchant people into existence? Just getting you a timeline was very impressive work, let me tell you, not just anyone could have pulled that off. You should see the effort it takes just to keep that sweatshirt of yours intact.” He nods toward my sweatshirt and starts walking away from me, toward the stairs leading down to the Red Line.

  I don’t follow him. I look down at my sweatshirt, my simple maroon-with-white-Boston hooded sweatshirt he gave me on my birthday. “This is an enchantment?” I say.

  Ben stops walking, turns back toward me. “Yes. A protection. One I’ve managed to hang on to despite your attempts to weaken me as much as possible, and it would be nice if you would just leave that one alone, thank you very much. Come on.” He holds his hand out, wiggling his fingers.

  “No,” I say. “Wait. Hang on. If everything I knew exists, what happened to it?”

  “Oh, it’s all still there. We just have to get back to it, which is what we’re doing now. You just peeled off your layer and threw it away, so now I have to get us back to all the other layers.”

  “How?”

  He gestures toward the stairs to the Red Line. “Have to go catch a train.”

  “The subway,” I say flatly. “We’re going to take the subway.”

  “Well, it isn’t just a subway. It’s never been just a subway. It connects the Thisworld and the Otherworld. You never noticed it because it was one of the layers I didn’t let you see.”

  “You’ve been controlling what I see and don’t see?”

  “Yes. That was my job.”

  “Your job,” I echo hollowly, my stomach sinking. There’s so much about this that is unbelievable, but it’s the idea that Ben was only friends with me because it was his job that hurts. “Who made it your job?”

  “I promise we’ll reveal everything after we get out of this mess you made and I get us back to Boston.” He says it good-naturedly, with a smile, waggling his fingers at me in invitation.

  The smile undoes me a bit. I am angry and confused and scared, but he is Ben, and he is smiling at me. He is waggling his fingers at me. How can Ben being adorable be wrong? I close my eyes, feeling overwhelmed.

  “You’re…confused,” Ben says, and he sounds confused that I’m confused.

  I open my eyes, disbelieving. “Yes, I’m confused. Listen to the things you’re saying to me, Ben. That your ‘job’ is to make everything in my life a lie—”

  “It was an enchantment,” he corrects.

  “That makes it more confusing, not less,” I point out.

  He regards me for a second. “I did too good a job with your enchantment,” he concludes. “You really had no idea.”

  “Wasn’t that the point?” I retort.

  “Yes, but…” He looks at a bit of a loss, which I’ve never seen him look before. “Let’s just get back to Boston, and then we can all tell you together.”

  “Who ‘all’?”

  “Your aunts, of course.”

  “So my aunts know all about this,” I realize. “All about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “Because not saying anything was basically the purpose of the enchantment.”

  “And my father knows too.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’ll help explain it too.”

  “Well. Not really.”
/>   “Why not?”

  Ben looks at me like this is obvious. “Well, because he’s insane.”

  For some reason, this surprises me. I thought, with all the craziness in the world around me, that surely, in the middle of all this, my father must now be considered sane. “Oh,” I say and try to deal with this.

  “Can we go now? We really should keep moving. We’re on the wrong side of the boundary right now. I need to cross us back over.”

  I swallow and make my decision. None of this makes any sense, but I seem to be all alone in a deserted subway station with only Ben for help, and what else am I going to do? I take a deep breath and put my hand in his.

  It feels like a momentous occasion. He threads his fingers through mine and gives my hand a little squeeze, and I feel breathless. I’ve been feeling that way for a while, given the pace at which things have been happening around me, but this is an entirely different sort of breathless.

  “Thank you,” he says to me, and his smile at me is warm and genuine, and everything is ridiculously confusing but I still feel flushed at that smile.

  Ben starts walking, and I follow, and yes, I still have no idea what’s going on, but Ben’s holding my hand and could it be that that’s really all I need to feel like things are moving in the right direction now? I hate the fact that that might be true, but I can’t deny that I’m much more pleased right now than I was just the minute before.

  “This is why my aunts didn’t want me asking questions, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” Ben answers.

  I want to ask him about my mother, but maybe it’s better to wait until we’re back with my aunts. We walk in silence down the staircase to the Red Line, stand on the platform, waiting patiently. Except that I’ve never been all alone on the Red Line platform before, it feels like a normal day. I stand with Ben’s hand in mine—okay, not completely normal—and gaze down onto the tracks, waiting. And after a while, I realize something. “The rats all disappeared too?” Normally you can stand on the platform and watch the rats scurrying all over the tracks.