Chime

Franny Billingsley

Most kids don ' t like to go to bed, but I did. I was the oldest of five kids, and our house was always filled with shouts and yells and bangs and crashes. Bedtime was a precious private space, away from the bangs and clangs ' bedtime was not a time for sleep! In the top bunk, I could get away from the chaos. I could barricade myself with pillows and spin out one of the magical stories always simmering in my mind.


Bedtime was also a time for singing. My dad sang to us every night; each kid got two songs. (Ten songs a night ' that ' s a lot of songs!) We kids were lucky: my dad (a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Chicago) had a lively interest in music (as well as in painting, and acting, and languages). He sang us a lot of American folk songs but was also interested in Scottish ballads. Those ballads, with their melancholy stories and haunting melodies, seeped into my blood; they flavored the stories I wrote inside my head, a new installment every night, night after night.


But I never thought I ' d be a writer. In fact, I never thought I ' d be much of anything, because I was such a lousy student. I daydreamed instead of listening to the teachers; I read instead of doing my homework. Reading was the only thing I was any good at. I was rather shy and solitary, but I don ' t think I was lonely. After all, I had a universe of friends inside my head.


I was most truly myself outside school, which is perhaps why I loved the year I left the American school system to spend fifth grade in Denmark. Denmark was a fairytale place, home of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen. I read his stories over and over, especially The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid. My memories of that year come to me now as though through a magical lens: the statue of the Little Mermaid rising from the gray waves of the Copenhagen harbor; myself at Christmas, wearing a crown of lighted candles; the Snow Queen ' s palace, present everywhere in the dark afternoons, the drifts of snow, the moon-shot ice.


In my late teens, however, I became self-conscious about being the outsider, the oddball, and I began making an effort to fit in. In order to join the crowd, I thought, I had to set aside my nighttime imaginings. And so I did. I had been spinning stories for seventeen years; it took only a moment to stop. I remember that moment vividly, the moment I turned away from magic. I remember my bedroom, the brown carpet, the blue sleeping bag, the deep afternoon shadows. Yes, it was the decision of a moment, but it lasted for years. I spent years pretending to be just like everyone else ' pretending even to myself ' and after college, I went to law school, just like everyone else.