“I want to go away.”
“You could stay with Uncle Darrell and Aunt Izzy?” Her father was already pulling out his phone.
“No. To a place where no one knows me.”
“New York?” her mother imagined she wanted to lose herself in a big city.
“No more cities. When they see me, all of them notice, no matter what the shrink says. I want to go to a place with fewer people. People are always going to say things, but at least in a tiny little town at a tiny little college, there will be less of them.”
“Baby, don’t hide what makes you-”
She shut the door in their faces, feeling bad. They got skin color drama. They did. But they had other people in the world the same shade as them. Sophie had never seen anyone who looked like she did, except on Halloween when white pancake makeup was smeared over faces.
Her fingers ticked over the laptop keys, searching.
Smallest colleges in Pennsylvania
Smallest colleges in Delaware
Smallest music schools in the country
Why can’t I tan?
Body makeup
Tanning spray
Back to the open searches. Antonia College appeared on two of them. Antonia, Pennsylvania, population: 3,460. Antonia College, current enrollment, sixteen hundred.
The college was half the town. The music department’s web page was pitiful.
Perfect.
She applied.
TWO
Things in Antonia weren’t different in a positive way.
They were worse.
Sophie had assumed, never having been to a small town in her life, that the people were spread out, avoiding each other, revelling in all of the big, wide-open spaces and their quaint Rockwell-esque single homes.
No. In a small town, all the people clustered. They moved in smaller packs, but still in packs. The whispers continued, the stares continued. With fewer people, there was less camouflage. Up here, the people seemed to be fairly homogenous. She stood out.
