The Names I Used to Have

Mira had been three names.

Until she was four, she had been Mihaela — her grandmother's name, picked by her mother because her grandmother had died the year before Mira was born. Mihaela was a careful, slightly old-fashioned, eight-letter name. It was a Romanian name. Mira's mother was Romanian and Mira's father was British and the family lived in a small town near Liverpool.

From four to eleven, she had been Misha. This was her father's nickname. He had started it when she was tiny — little Misha, my little mouse — and it had stuck. Her primary school had known her as Misha. Her birth certificate said Mihaela. She had kept the inconsistency without thinking about it the way children keep all sorts of inconsistencies without thinking about them.

When Mira was eleven, the family had moved sixty miles south for her father's work. New town, new school, no friends. On her first day at the new school, she had been asked at registration what name to put on the register. She had stood there for a long time. She had not — for reasons she could not have explained at the time — wanted to be Misha at the new school. Misha was the name a small child went by. Misha was the name her father called her. Misha did not sound like anyone she wanted to be at age eleven. But she had not, also, wanted to be Mihaela. Mihaela was too long. Mihaela would get mispronounced. Mihaela would, shesuspected, mark her out.

She had said, on the spot: "Mira."

The teacher had written Mira on the register. Mira had become Mira.

That was three years ago. Mira was now fourteen. She had been Mira for the entirety of her teenage life. Her current friends — Hanna, Liv, Esme, Bo — knew her only as Mira. Her teachers knew her as Mira. The girl in the school photo, smiling with a slight gap in her front teeth, was Mira.

Her family — her mother, her father, her older brother — knew all three names. They mostly used Mira. Her father slipped sometimes and said Misha. Her mother, very rarely, when angry or worried, said Mihaela.

Mira had not, until this winter, thought much about it.

Then her grandmother on her mother's side died. Her other grandmother, her father's mother, had been gone since before Mira was born. The grandmother who had just died was the one Mira had been named after — Mihaela the first.

Mira flew with her mother to Romania for the funeral. She had been to Romania twice as a child. She did not remember it well. She did not, properly, speak Romanian. She remembered ten words.

The funeral was in a small village outside Iaşi. Mira's mother had grown up in the village. The whole village seemed to come. Old women in black scarves kissed Mira on both cheeks. They called her Mihaela. They told her how like her grandmother she looked.

Mira did not feel like Mihaela. She felt very much like Mira, awkward and English in a black coat that was the wrong weight for the cold.

But standing at the graveside, listening to a service in a language she only half-followed, looking at the photograph of her grandmother propped on the wreath — a young woman in a white dress, taken in the 1960s, with eyes that were undeniably the same eyes Mira saw in the bathroom mirror