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blurted out the truth. “I want someone … like him, a boy, I mean … someone special.”
    â€œShe wants a sweetheart,” someone whispered, and a murmur went around the Sisterhood.
    â€œThat’s what we all want.”
    â€œKind eyes and a warm heart.”
    â€œShe just wants love, that’s all.”
    â€œTrue love.”
    Yes. Yes, that special love was what I had always dreamed of. I knew I wasn’t worthy yet, but if I could learn enough about clothes and makeup and how to act, if I could grow pretty enough, then maybe someday—
    The Sphinx spoke, her lioness voice gentler. “But in this, too, we can help you, little daughter.”
    My dream shattered like glass breaking. Freaks, calling me daughter? I wanted to scream, stamp my feet, hit something. My mind went red with rage so fiery it warmed my snakes and woke them. I felt them rear, heard them hissing like ticked-off alley cats. I snaked my neck as I swung around, peering at a circle of monster women in the dark. “Look at you!” I cried at all of them. I turned on my mother. “Look at you! What a life, hiding your snakes, your teeth, your nails, pretending to be normal. Well, you’re not. You’re not even a real sculptor. You’re a fake. You’re a poser.”
    In a tone so steely that I knew I had hurt her, she said, “I am a real gorgon.”
    â€œWell, I don’t want to be a gorgon!”
    If “becoming a woman” meant growing up to be another one of—of my Mom—no. No . I felt like I had to hurt her, to get away from her. I felt like I was fighting for my life. “I don’t want to be like you! Any of you!” I yelled, glaring at all of them. “I’m not going to be like you!” My voice broke with the weight of emotion it carried, because nobody would ever love me now, nobody could love a monster. Unless …
    In that moment I knew what I had to do. I said, “I am going to lose these snakes.”
    Silence, except for a hissy sort of tee-hee-hee inside my head. My snakes were laughing.
    â€œI mean it.” There had to be a way to get rid of them. And I would find it. I would make it happen.
    I would do it. Even though my rage had whooshed out of me and left me trembling, even while the snakes quivered with laughter on my head, I knew bone-deep that I needed to keep trying until I found a way to be myself and not my mother’s daughter.
    â€œI mean it,” I said again, as quiet as the moon now.
    There was a sigh from the Sisterhood that felt like “Amen.” Then the Sphinx growled, and I turned to her.
    As if she needed to see something inward, she narrowed her topaz eyes, her gaze heavy-lidded, shadowed. Somehow this made her even scarier than before, so fearsome that I took a step back. Yet when she spoke, her deep-chested voice came out calm, almost kind.
    She said: “To lose, you must win, and to win, you must loosen, Medusa. I foresee that you will walk this way again.” She opened her eyes. “Euryale, take her home.”
    I glanced at my mother, then stared. Under the shadow of her turban, Mom’s face looked like a carving in white marble. “Sphinx, what riddle is this?” she whispered.
    But the Sphinx answered only, “Bring her back when the maiden moon shines again.”
    And when I looked to the top of the boulder, the Sphinx was gone.

FOUR
    Even though I had been up really late, the next morning when the SoHo branch library opened, there I was waiting at the door. With a big ugly babushka tied over my head, in my sloppiest old bib overalls, I stood there like a homeless person eager to get in for the day to stay out of the cold.
    Only warmth wasn’t what I wanted. I was there for info I couldn’t find on the Internet. Surely a real library would have a book just for me. Maybe something in the hygiene section: Eliminating Dandruff, Head Lice, and Scalp Snakes . Or