Towering (10 page)

But, this past Sunday, when I went to bed at night, I felt a tugging. I was sleeping on top of my hair. It had already grown far past my waist, and it had been mere hours since it had been cut.

Thinking this strange, I braided it up and threw the braids over my shoulder, so they just touched the floor.

When I woke, the braids were on the floor, all the way on the floor. But I couldn’t see them because coiled over them was more hair, so much more golden hair than I had braided. It grew so fast that I could see it move if I watched it. When I stood, it reached the floor, and if I folded it over, it would reach my head again.

For some reason, I knew not to tell Mama. Rather, I brushed and braided it, a task of hours, and then, I hid it under my covers. I even tucked part of it under the mattress.

When Mama came, I dimmed the lights. “I feel sick today. Please don’t turn on the lights. It hurts my eyes.” I often got headaches, so this was believable, though I never caught cold. Girls in books got sick from the cold or going out in the rain or being exposed to others who were ill. I did none of those things.

But Mama said, “Oh, my poor dear,” and pressed her wrinkled hand to my forehead.

“No fever, at least. Had I but known, I would have brought you a nice chicken soup.”

But, of course, there was no way for her to know because she was not there. But I did not say it. I would argue sometime when I was not hiding twenty feet of hair beneath my covers. Today was a day to be sweet, not cross. “Can you bring it tomorrow? Or come back later?”

She never came twice in one day, but I thought perhaps this one time, she might.

“I get so lonely here, especially when I am sick.”

She smiled, so I added, “And can you bring me some items as well?”

“What is it you want, my dear?”

I had thought a great deal about this, about a list of items, a long list, to mask my real request.

“My art supplies are dwindling. I need some paper and paints, watercolors and acrylics.” She had replaced my paints quite recently, but I hoped she would not notice their nearly full condition in the dark. “Oh, and scissors.”

“Scissors?”

I breathed in. “The snowflakes. I have been watching them from my window. They are so pretty, and when they sometimes land so I can see them on the glass, they have shapes, all sorts of shapes like faceted stars. I thought, perhaps, I could cut shapes like snowflakes and hang them from the ceiling, to bring the outside in.”

“You wouldn’t . . . hurt yourself, would you?”

“Of course not. I just want to create something beautiful. Please.”

“Very well. I will bring them.”

“Oh, and I’d need some string to hang them.”

“Very well. I’ll go now to get them. Do you want me to brush your hair before I leave?”

“It will hurt my head. I braided it anyway.” I gestured toward my hair, which had already grown another foot since I’d last braided it. “I don’t feel well enough to sit up.”

“I will bring some tea as well.”

By the time she returned, my hair had grown my body length yet again, and I had braided it twice more. She brought the chicken soup, and I allowed her to spoon it between my lips even though I was dying for her to leave. She loved to pretend I was an infant.

After she left, I did not cut my hair. I knew she would not be back until at least the next morning, maybe later. So I waited, braiding and rebraiding my hair, watching it inch away from my scalp. By morning, it stretched across the room and back. I braided it and waited, cutting snowflake shapes too, dozens of them, to make true my lie about why I needed the scissors.

When the sun was high in the sky, my braid reached the ground when dangled out the window. It was sufficient. I tied my hair on both sides with the string Mama had brought, then cut it carefully, the scissors nearly scratching my scalp. Then, I coiled up the braid and stuffed it under my bed.

Oddly, once I cut it, it did not grow so backbreakingly fast again. When Mama arrived, it reached my chest, no more. A little shorter than normal. I hoped she would not notice. I also hoped she would not look under my bed, for if she did, she would see the rope I had begun to make. There was only one purpose for a rope, and she would know it.

I began to cut more snowflakes. I was getting quite good at it, folding the paper over and over into a thick square, then cutting borders and boxes and diamonds to make it resemble the snowflakes on the windowsill. But this time, my hand slipped and the scissors’ sharp blade sliced into my fingertip. I gave a cry and felt tears spring to my eyes. A drop of red blood stained the white snowflake. I wiped a tear.

And then, the strangest thing happened. When I examined my finger again, it wasn’t bleeding at all.

It wasn’t that the blood had been staunched. Rather, it was as if it had never bled. But when I looked at the snowflake, it was still stained red.

Obviously, it hadn’t been a bad cut. I was just being a baby.

But when I put my finger into my mouth, the metallic taste of blood that wasn’t there still lingered.

I fell asleep with the diary in my hand. When I woke in the morning, the clouds were white and so thick they looked like drifted snow. That was how my head felt too, and I wondered if I was drunk. Had I imagined the singing in the night? The light?

I started to pick up the diary again, to see what had happened. But then, I heard Mrs. Greenwood in the hall outside and stowed the notebook under my mattress.

“I thought maybe we could go to a movie tonight,” she said when I opened the door.

“There’s a movie theater around here?” It didn’t seem like there was much of anything here.

But she nodded. “In Chestertown. It’s a bit south of here. They have movies every Friday and on holidays.”

Now, I remembered my mother mentioning it. She said she’d grown up in a town so small the closest movie theater was thirty miles away and only showed movies on weekends and holidays.

“I understand if you don’t want to go,” she said.

“Of course I want to.” I didn’t.

“It’s just such a long drive for me to make by myself. I haven’t been since Danielle . . .”

“Of course I’ll go.” I was a jerk to even think of not going.

“I checked the paper. It begins at eight. It sounds like some sort of space thing.”

“And you really like that?” I remembered her watching
Star Trek
.

She clapped her hands. “I love it. After I introduced Danielle to
Star Trek
and
The Next Generation
, she told me about the
Terminator
films.”

My eyes widened. “You liked all those machine guns and cursing and stuff?” My own grandfather got mad when I watched a movie with the word
freaking
in it.

“I liked Ahnold—before he became a politician or whatever he’s doing now.” She laughed. “Does that surprise you?”

“No. I used to know a girl who loved all those movies.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“Not really. I mean, I’d have liked her to be, but it was complicated.”

“Everything with your generation is complicated. When I was young, you just fell in love and got married.”

“We were old friends. If we’d started dating and it hadn’t worked out, it would have been awkward.”

She nodded. “What did you finally do?”

I looked away. “There was an . . . accident. She died.” I knew Mrs. Greenwood knew what had really happened. I just couldn’t say it.

“Oh, yes, your mother told me about your friends. I’m so sorry.” She looked like she wanted to put her arms around me or something, but she was waiting for permission.

I didn’t give it to her. “Yeah, me too.” Change the subject. I needed to change the subject. “Hey, I was going to go to the hardware store today, pick up the hinges for your cabinets. Then, I could work on them tomorrow, or later if there’s time before the movie.”

“I don’t think the hardware store will be open. It’s New Year’s.”

Of course, she was right. I should have accepted Astrid’s invitation to go skiing. Yet I realized I didn’t want to, didn’t want to be around happy, bright people, people who didn’t know all the bad things that happened, that could happen if you weren’t careful, and sometimes, even if you were.

I could probably tell her I was going skiing or make some other excuse to leave, but when I looked at my watch, it was after noon, and it seemed easier to wait until tomorrow. It had probably just been the wind anyway. At least, no one else seemed to hear it. Which was the story of my life lately.

“Is there anything else I can fix for you? I did everything around our house. I’m actually pretty good with electrical.”

“What a good boy you are. I can probably find you something to do, but let’s have breakfast first.”

I reddened a bit at being called a good boy. I didn’t feel like one lately, especially since I’d been planning to sneak around on her. “Let me just put on some jeans first. It’s cold.”

“You’re a good boy, Wyatt,” she repeated before she left.

I wondered why she had repeated it, but I shrugged it off. Just something old ladies said, I guessed. If you weren’t actually committing a carjacking that they knew about, they thought you were a great kid. I put on jeans and a sweater.

Before I went downstairs, I pulled the diary out from where I’d hidden it. I had left it open to the last page I’d read. I meant just to hide it better, but first, I flipped it over. I had to see what happened next.

But the next page was blank. All the remaining pages were.

I knew they would be, but I hoped they wouldn’t. Just like part of me hoped Danielle was still alive and writing her diary someplace else.

The movie we saw ended up being one of those dystopian things where it’s a futuristic society, and everyone’s a drone except the hero, who has to whip everyone else into shape. Oh, and there were robots. Evil robots, which Mrs. Greenwood seemed to enjoy thoroughly, at least, she moved forward in her seat and clasped her hands together every time they showed up onscreen.

Afterward, we got pizza, and Mrs. Greenwood said, “Do you ever think how you’d deal with a situation like that?”

“Like what? Like in the movie?” We’d gotten pepperoni, and it was actually pretty good, even though it was upstate New York pizza instead of real New York pizza.

“Yes. If the world was gone wrong, would you be one of the people fighting against the problem or one of the people ignoring it?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone thinks they’d be one of the fighters, the Guy Montag or Katniss Everdeen. But in movies like that, there’s always one person raging against the machine. And then, there’s a million people
being
the machine, just going along, unquestioning. They do what they’re told because they don’t want to end up in jail or have people think they’re crazy.”

“Maybe they don’t even realize there’s a problem.”

“Don’t realize? Or ignore it because it’s too scary to do anything else.” The waitress, a girl with dyed black hair, seemed to be listening to our conversation. But maybe, it was just because of what Astrid said last night, because I wasn’t from around here.

Mrs. Greenwood looked her up and down, then turned back to me. “Sometimes, I think you can tell yourself there isn’t a problem because you don’t want there to be. Or because you don’t think you’re strong enough to deal with it if there is one.”

Exactly. “If you’re not a hero, does that make you a villain?”

Mrs. Greenwood pursed her lips, and I knew she was thinking about Danielle like I was thinking about Tyler. Probably, she thought about Danielle every day. Any mother would. “I don’t think so. That would make just about everyone a villain then. The real villains are the ones who are actually commanding the evil robots to destroy the hero.”

The waitress had walked away. “I think I’d like to be the hero. I mean, it’s not my nature to be the hero, to be the person who recognizes the problem and takes charge, but I think if you know that about yourself, you can change it too.”

She didn’t answer, and I wondered if I’d hurt her feelings because she hadn’t done that with Danielle. I thought about how it was probably different with parents and kids. Probably parents just had a blind spot where their kids were concerned, preferring to see them as the perfect little babies they were before they got messed up. Or maybe you could just get so close to someone you stopped looking.