Page 8 of The Light Between Worlds

Georgia Maxton and I were assigned to one another as roommates the day we began at school, less than a year before I found my way home to the Great Wood. She’s short and clever, with deep-brown skin and curling black hair, and it didn’t take long for the two of us to discover a shared fascination for the written word.

“Oh, thank heaven you’re here,” she says when I step over the threshold of our shared space. “That racket’s been going straight through my head for the past hour. Shut the door, won’t you? When I do, Penwallis says I’m being unsociable.”

I shut the door slowly, ensuring several of Lizzie Penwallis’s underlings see me in the act.

“Best verse of summer,” Georgie says from where she sits, still looking down at her book with her chin propped on her hands.“Let’s get yours out of the way, because Iknowit’ll only be Dickinson or Teasdale.”

I don’t mind Georgie’s teasing. She’s right—I go back to my favorites again and again while she reads voraciously, forever seeking out new words.

“This won out for me,” I tell her. “It fits for start of term, too—

“I have no heart for any other joy,

The drenched September day turns to depart,

And I have said good-bye to what I love;

With my own will I vanquished my own heart.

On the long wind I hear the winter coming—

The window panes are cold and blind with rain;

With my own will I turned the summer from me

And summer will not come to me again.”

“Teasdale, isn’t it?” Georgie asks, and rolls her eyes good-naturedly when I nod. “Evelyn Hapwell, you’ve got to expand your mind. Listen to this—it’s Frances Harper, and rather brilliant...

‘Light! more light! the shadows deepen,

And my life is ebbing low,

Throw the windows widely open:

Light! more light! before I go.

‘Softly let the balmy sunshine

Play around my dying bed,

E’er the dimly lighted valley

I with lonely feet must tread.

‘Light! more light! for Death is weaving

Shadows ’round my waning sight,

And I fain would gaze upon him

Through a stream of earthly light.’”

I take a slow, measured breath. They’re starting early this year, my memories of the Woodlands. Pushing back at the recollection of a moonlit valley, and a haunting voice singing oflight unto light, I open my school trunk.

When I say nothing about the poem, Georgie glances up for the first time. “You look like you’ve just come from a funeral. What happened?”

Unpacking at least affords my hands something to do. School sweaters, navy with St. Agatha’s gold crest on one pocket. Wool socks for the colder months. Handkerchiefs and bars of pink soap.