Excerpt from Whidbey by T Kira Madden, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Finally, I said, I'm Birdie.

I'd introduced myself with pseudonyms off and on for most of my life, names I'd lifted from films, sometimes historical figures. When forced to sign Greenpeace clipboard petitions, I was Judy Barton. My coffee orders and library books belonged to Mary Ann Zielonko. Online, hotel bookings, mail: Wilma Dean Loomis or Jacy Farrow. It's good, sometimes, to be another person, one therapist had said, long ago. The sound of my own, true name prickled, an ash in my mouth, and already I knew I was getting away with something. Birdie Chang, I told this man.

Rich was holding a paperback copy of Animorphs, a series I'd loved as a kid. On the cover, the boy in a brown jacket transformed into an eagle in vivid, holographic layers.

Haven't seen one of those in years, I said, pointing.

He bent the book back and forth in his hands, testing its flexibility. It made no sound. One-dollar cart at Elliott Bay, Rich said. Collected these as a kid. Guess I wanted to take a trip back in time. And you know, the story really holds up. He slapped the book with the back of his hand. There's some serious literary merit here, he said.

I hated men. More precisely, I hated how a man like Rich could carry a book like Animorphs on a boat, unashamed, gleeful. He could slap it. Some serious literary merit—he could say something like that, and it would be considered refreshing, sweet. What a confident man, my mother, Wendy, would say, not trying to prove a thing. Another woman might note his vulnerable masculinity, of course she would, he'd asked for it. But we were all trying, all the time, I reminded myself. That's how we become the people we are, impressionistically, chiseling lumps of selfhood off the truer, moldering form. There was always the effort to prove, though only certain people got to do so with pleasure. I tried to reel empathy from any part of myself.

I used to like that story, too, I said. Same generation, I guess.

It ends sad, he said.

It had to.

Rich spun the bag of clothes again. The plastic left pale ridges across his wrist. He said, what are you, twenty? Twenty-three?

Twenty-eight, I said.

No shit?

Asian genes.

Same, he said, tilting ear to shoulder.

I must have looked confused. I said nothing. There was nothing I could think of to say. Rich waited for me to go on, then smiled. He said: You Stanford sun-hat Asians always gonna forget brown Asians.

I rolled my suitcase directly in front of me, snapped the handle down. Then I wrapped my legs around the sides of it and squeezed, remembering the book that was inside.

You don't know anything about me, I said.

I think you're tired, this man said. Real tired.

I am tired.

What do you have going on on the rock?

The rock?

On Whidbey? he said.

Trace and I had rehearsed several potential responses: I was visiting family (boring, no follow-up questions). I was meeting with researchers to study moss and hydrology (for this I'd googled the absolute basics). Always I could default to I don't speak English, the quickest way to be left alone, forgotten. But Rich was frank and direct and didn't regard me with pity; no, he didn't have that pitying scrunch between the eyebrows, the soft tone—it wasn't there. He knew my real name, and speaking to him felt like a challenge, one I shamefully, senselessly, wanted to pass. So I told him the truth: I'm hiding from someone. From a lot of people.

Rich fanned the corner of the book with the tip of his thumb. Back and forth, tightly, like a deck of cards. He looked right at me, unmoved, elbows on his knees.

Someone, Rich said. He hurt you, or he wants to?

He already did, I said. He's a pedophile.

Rich didn't budge. His big seal eyes blinked sleepily. Trace would toss me off the boat if she knew I'd shared this much. My mother would say, You have got to be joking, maybe even get uncharacteristically violent. I knew better than to spill; I knew anyone could be a friend of Calvin's, maybe someone he'd met inside, someone with my photo and information printed and folded in their wallet. But there were so many lessons I'd never learned in my life, so many mistakes I'd continued to make, and some thrill giving up and into that person.

Excerpted from Whidbey by T Kira Madden. Copyright © 2026 by T Kira Madden. Excerpted by permission of Mariner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.