Ambrose

Lily wants to live in the old days. Her mom, Debra, says, No, you don’t, because in the old days all women did was cook and sew and die in childbirth, but Lily still wishes she could travel back in time.

- Allegra Goodman

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.