had not really figured that out—yet.
What if she had been given a different name? Anne Knutsen, for instance.
Would she then have been someone else?
She suddenly remembered that Dad had originally wanted her to be called
Lillemor. Sophie tried to imagine herself shaking hands and introducing herself as
Lillemor Amundsen, but it seemed all wrong. It was someone else who kept
introducing herself.
She jumped up and went into the bathroom with the strange letter in her hand.
She stood in front of the mirror and stared into her own eyes.
“I am Sophie Amundsen,” she said.
The girl in the mirror did not react with as much as a twitch. Whatever Sophie
did, she did exactly the same. Sophie tried to beat her reflection to it with a lightning
movement but the other girl was just as fast.
“Who are you?” Sophie asked.
She received no response to this either, but felt a momentary confusion as to
whether it was she or her reflection who had asked the question.
Sophie pressed her index finger to the nose in the mirror and said, “You are
me.”
As she got no answer to this, she turned the sentence around and said, “I am
you.”
Sophie Amundsen was often dissatisfied with her appearance. She was
frequently told that she had beautiful almond-shaped eyes, but that was probably just
something people said because her nose was too small and her mouth was a bit too
big. And her ears were much too close to her eyes. Worst of all was her straight hair,
which it was impossible to do anything with. Sometimes her father would stroke her
hair and call her “the girl with the flaxen hair,” after a piece of music by Claude
Debussy. It was all right for him, he was not condemned to living with this straight
dark hair. Neither mousse nor styling gel had the slightest effect on Sophie’s hair.
Sometimes she thought she was so ugly that she wondered if she was malformed at
birth. Her mother always went on about her difficult labor. But was that really what
determined how you looked?
Wasn’t it odd that she didn’t know who she was? And wasn’t it unreasonable
that she hadn’t been allowed to have any say in what she would look like? Her looks
had just been dumped on her. She could choose her own friends, but she certainly
hadn’t chosen herself. She had not even chosen to be a human being.
What was a human being?
Sophie looked up at the girl in the mirror again.
“I think I’ll go upstairs and do my biology homework,” she said, almost
apologetically. Once she was out in the hall, she thought, No, I’d rather go out in the
garden.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty!”
Sophie chased the cat out onto the doorstep and closed the front door behind
her.
As she stood outside on the gravel path with the mysterious letter in her hand,
the strangest feeling came over her. She felt like a doll that had suddenly been brought
to life by the wave of a magic wand.
Wasn’t it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a
wonderful adventure!
Sherekan sprang lightly across the gravel and slid into a dense clump of red-
currant bushes. A live cat, vibrant with energy from its white whiskers to the