Like any other thirteen-year-old girl, and like no other, Elphie is swamped in her own self, Elphie. Impetuous. Rational and superstitious at the same time. Attuned to injustice if metered out against herself, but unlike many kids at the vulnerable moment of near adolescence, she is also alert to oppressions that others have to endure.
Perhaps the puzzle of Nessa is at the root of Elphie’s inclination to—to notice. Elphie’s awareness of suffering isn’t quite compassion—maybe it has no name. Elphie can be selfish as the next kid, even if she’s seldom had kids other than her siblings to measure herself against. Her father owns all the compassion in the family, if you can call his kindly superiority a sort of compassion. No. Elphie is no saint. Neither does she aspire to that position.
Not being able to tolerate the feel of water on her skin, Elphie is, it must be said, not the most sweet-smelling of children. Perhaps, with their more relaxed approach to personal hygiene, Animals will find her more trustworthy because she’s indifferent to lotions and attars.
At nighttime, after she has sung Shell to sleep, she coils in her own sheets, twisted as a nautilus, in a birth clench, waiting to be real, to be something other than herself, waiting to be herself. No different from any thirteen-year-old human child. No different, and so different.