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Ophelia

“What do you mean, she didn’t float?”

We sit back to back on the trampoline, heads tilted upwards, but not so much so that we had to look at each other.

“You’ve never read Hamlet?” But he seems more interested in playing with the ends of my hair than in Shakespeare. Twirling it around and around his finger.

Before he left, my dad had always said that it had been a silly idea to name me Ophelia. “Why name your daughter after a suicide?” But my mother thought it perfect. “After all, she can’t swim…” No one ever pointed out that this was because she’d never put me in lessons, when everyone else was floating in the pool at the Y.

I always wondered if she’d done that to justify my name.

He shrugs. “No.”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” I tell him. “About the real Ophelia.”

“You mean you’re not real?” I turn a little, catch his eye. He’s smiling.

It’s true. Ophelia didn’t float. And neither did I. But this isn’t so much the story of that. It’s everything that came before, and everything that came after.

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