Part the Second
Obligatory childhood recap.
She was an awkward child. Looking back later in life she would say she was too aware. Shy, uncomfortable around others, slow to make friends, more at ease with her parents, her sister, her books. Her mother, her father, her sister were all knowns, and so much easier to understand and navigate (the two older brothers were twin planets orbiting at the edge of her universe, and once they left her space, as distant as Pluto.). A poor family, they never had much. Second-hand clothes, haircuts at home, bus rides to school – all minefields to be carefully crossed everywhere. Easier to not invite friends over to the run-down house. Easier to sink into a book when classmates mocked her lack of fashion. Easier to be the teacher’s pet and pass with good grades and get noted as a gifted child, because these could be used as bandages and salve against a world that didn’t always make sense. But always, at the end of each day, there was home, and her mother, and her father, and her sister.
Her and her younger sister, at first, closest of all. She liked horses, and her sister was dragged along not too unwillingly into horse games of every kind. Bikes were horses. Cars were horses. They themselves were horses and stabled themselves in an old shed behind their house. Her sister played with dolls – baby to Barbie – and she played with horses.
And then she discovered books.
And her sister was left to her own devices.
Toni L.H. Boughton 