Will o’ the Wisp is the first book in the Middle Name Trilogy, in which we learn Selkie’s secret and begin Selkie’s journey. Please enjoy the excerpt below, and then pop over to the forum to talk about it!

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One day my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to an insane asylum.

This is how the story of my birth goes.

My father says my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I always ask how she ended up on his couch. Where did she come from? I ask. Why was she there? Did you know her? My father always looks at me vaguely. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, he tells me, and then he tells me the story of my name. Selkie, he says. She told me to name you Selkie. And I ask, How did she tell you? And he replies, She etched it into a snowflake, sighed it into a gust of wind, rustled it through the trees of autumn, rippled it over a summer pond.

And my aunts sigh and say, That’s enough.

When I was little, I used to think maybe my mother would come to take me away. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue weren’t exactly my aunts. They were my dad’s aunts, making them my great-aunts, and they were older than I could pinpoint when I was young. Now that I’m older, I know that they’re older than my dad, but I can’t quite figure out exactly how much older. Dad was their little brother’s only child, but the dates of births in my family are fuzzy. Who wants to remember how old they are? Aunt True asks me. I have never had a birthday party. Or an acknowledgment of my birthday. But I do have a birthday.

It is today.

I am sitting on Boston Common, watching the tourists get lost and the leaves fall, and I am thinking. The Common is the huge park in the middle of Boston. The story I have always been told is that it was originally cow pasture, and that the paved paths meandering through it follow the original cow paths, and I believe that, there is an aimlessness to them. I like that about Boston Common. I like that the place feels like it has no discernible goal, in this age without cows. It is unnecessary, frivolity in the middle of the city, prime real estate that isn’t even landscaped, really, is just basic grass and some scattered trees. It is a place that just is, and I have always found, sprawled on the ground and looking at the buildings that crowd around it, that it is the perfect place to think.

I am, according to my birth certificate, 18 today. I don’t know whether or not to believe my birth certificate, though, honestly. Some days I feel that I must be much older than 18, and that somebody got it all wrong: my addle-minded father, or my aunts who don’t keep track of dates. And some days I feel like a small child and I just want my mother.

I feel that way now.

I am thinking of my mother, of how I am told I resemble her. I have never seen her photograph, so all I can do is study myself in the mirror and draw conclusions from there. Tall, I suppose. Slender. Pale skin that never darkens in the summer but stays stubbornly white. Blue eyes. Blonde hair so light that it can be white in certain lights. I wear my hair long, and I wonder if my mother did. If she does still, wherever she is.

“Hey,” says Ben. Ben works at one of the stands scattered through the Common. On hot summer days, Ben makes fresh-squeezed lemonade that he gives me for free. He brings them to me, while I lie on the grass in the heat and read books and tell him what they’re about. You’re like my own personal audiobook, Ben tells me. Well, I say. Abridged. And Ben laughs. Now, at the time of year when it can be summer or winter both in the same day, Ben makes lemonade or sells sweatshirts, as the mood strikes him. It must be sweatshirts today, because he’s brought me one, and he drops it playfully on top of my head, draped so that it momentarily obscures my vision.

I feel like I have known Ben all my life, but that’s not true. I just can’t remember the first time I met him, is the problem. I have always come to the Common to be alone, alone among the strangers, and Ben has always been in the background of life on the Common. I don’t know when we started speaking to each other, when he started bringing me lemonade, when we learned each other’s name. It all just happened, the way good things just happen, without having to be forced. Ben is, I think, older than me, in a way that always makes me feel very young, but I don’t think he does it on purpose, the way the college guys do when we cross paths on the T, Boston’s sprawling and ever-crowded subway system. Ben is effortlessly older than me. He is tall and thin and has a lot of thick, dark, curly hair and very pale eyes, and for a little while now I have been ignoring the advances of Mike Summerton at school because there is Ben. But I don’t think Ben is thinking that way, and what’s really kind of annoying is that, in a relationship where I don’t ever remember even having to tell Ben my name, why should I have to tell him that we’re kind of dating, even if he doesn’t know it and has never kissed me? He should just know, the way he knew I’d like lemonade, and that I was cold and needed a sweatshirt.

“What are you up to?” he asks me, dropping to the leaf-strewn grass next to me. Ben moves with an absent-minded elegance. When he drops to the ground, it almost feels like he floats his way down. It sounds weird, but it’s the only way I can think to describe it, a soft fluttering quality to the way Ben moves. It is, trust me, very appealing. Ben never clumsily plops to the ground beside me, Ben always sort of sinks there. And you get the feeling, watching Ben move, that everything he does is very deliberate, no motion wasted. It makes it terribly flattering when he uses those deliberate, studied motions to come talk to you.

“It’s wet,” he says, of the grass.

“Yeah,” I reply, unconcerned.

He shrugs and takes the sweatshirt out of my hands.

“Hey,” I protest, as he puts it on the ground and sits on it. “I was going to wear that.”

“You know I hate to be wet,” he says. And he does, I do know this. He complains vociferously whenever it rains. He has sixteen different ways of fending off rain. I always ask him why he lives in Boston and sells things outside if he hates the rain so much, because it rains here a lot. And Ben always shrugs. Ben shrugs in response to lots of things. Like whenever I ask him why he doesn’t go to school. Two hundred colleges in the Boston area, and Ben’s smart, surely he could find one that’s affordable enough for him.

And Ben shrugs.

“Today is my birthday,” I blurt out. I don’t know why I say it, just then. I never tell anyone my birthday. I expect Aunt True and Aunt Virtue to come running out of the townhouse to scold me about how polite people never reveal such personal information.

Nobody comes dashing across Beacon Street. A homeless man down by the entrance to the T shouts about finding God, and Ben says, “Happy birthday.” He does not ask me how old I am. I am glad for that. Then he says, “It’s the autumnal equinox. You were born on the autumnal equinox.”

“Not really. Well, I don’t know. The autumnal equinox is different every year.”

Ben shrugs.

I want to tell him that I would like to find my mother. That I am 18 now and it is time to find my mother.

I don’t.