The Invisible Hour

by Alice Hoffman

This time, the punishment was worse. They had hung a rope around my neck on which there was a badge announcing the rules I had broken. A for acts of wickedness. A for affront and for anarchy. A for avoidance and antisocial behavior. A for ambition. Tomorrow they would burn the letter A into my arm so I would never forget the reason for my punishment.

They had found books in my possession. Shakespeare’s collected plays. The Blue Book of Fairy Tales, which had been my mother’s favorite when she was a girl. Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems. I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. Every time I had gone to town, I’d managed to sneak into the library. I knew there was magic there, and I knew they would do their best to destroy it.

Long before the sun came up, before they went to the barn and found I was gone, before they began to search for me, I was at the library. That was when my life began.

To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.

Whenever Mia could get away unnoticed, she hiked into the forest to read her most recent novel on the bank of the Last Look River. The birds took flight when she turned the pages, the leaves were shaken from the trees. If there be magic, Mia whispered there in the forest, let it be mine.

The world in which she had dreamed that her mother would come to her one night and whisper, Let’s run away. Let’s do it together. Let’s be invisible at last.

This was her chance, and she knew it might not come again. Her mother was gone, and nothing was left. But even if Mia had nowhere to go, she did not intend to let Joel decide her fate. She would become invisible and disappear completely. Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.

Mia grabbed a novel without bothering to look at the title or author. She planned to take the path into the woods after she checked out the book so that fool Tom wouldn’t spy her. “Your choice is excellent,” Mrs. Mott said when Mia approached the desk. “Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of my favorites.” It was the book that had been inscribed to her, with the brown and gold cover.

To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

West of the moon, the only girls who were rescued were the ones who saved themselves.

It occurred to her that she would never have had this second life if she hadn’t run away from the Community, if Sarah hadn’t given her the key to the library and Constance hadn’t opened her heart to her, and she would be damned if she brought her bad fortune to them in the form of Joel Davis. She shivered to think that if she hadn’t found The Scarlet Letter, none of the rest of her life would have happened.

She remembered that you could never look back, because if you did, you would understand just how much you were about to lose.

She didn’t dare return to the cemetery for fear that Joel was still in town, but if she had reached Nathaniel in the place where he’d been buried, she believed she could reach him again at the house where he’d been born, and that was her destination now. She was going to Salem.