Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,19

I’ve never eaten a snail before.”

“A snail?”

“On TV, you hear about people going to fancy restaurants and eating things like caviar or snails. But we don’t have any restaurants like that here, and if we did, people would think it was gross anyway. Here, people just eat things like pot roast. Pot roast!”

He smiled. “That, I can help you with.”

From the picnic basket, he removed a small container of what looked like salad. I’d noticed it before, but I hadn’t gotten too excited about it. Salad wasn’t my thing. “Try this?”

“Lettuce? Not very exciting.” He didn’t even have any dressing from what I could see.

But he opened the container and reached inside to take out one single leaf. He held it between two long, slender fingers. Beyond it, I could see his strange blue eyes, and then, the green itself seemed to glow almost blue too. It was shaped like a heart with little tendrils of smaller hearts hanging from the stem. I opened my mouth.

The second the leaf touched my tongue, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of incredible peace. As I chewed, the world grew sharper, brighter. I could pick out the songs of individual birds and smell the pine trees and each flower. In fact, I could even see the flowers blooming.

Zach leaned toward me. His eyes were psychedelic blue. “You know what else is exciting?” he said. “You.”

And he kissed me. I kissed him back, and I don’t know what was real after that and what was a dream. I could see the reflections of trees on the lake, and I felt like I could jump in and climb them, entering another world, a tree world. Then, Zach was carrying me across a field of flowers toward a ruined tower I’d never seen before. All I knew for sure was that I was in love, so in love, and from this day forward, everything in time will be divided between the days before I met Zach and the days after.

I’m in love.

As I finished the page, Mrs. Greenwood called me, for dinner. Then, we watched Star Trek, which apparently is on all the time somewhere, if you have five thousand cable channels. It wasn’t as dumb as I thought it was.

I told Mrs. Greenwood that.

She nodded. “Gene Roddenberry, the creator, wanted to show what mankind might develop into, if only they learned from their mistakes.”

“Fascinating,” I said, imitating Mr. Spock.

“He wanted to end violence. For example, the Vulcans had a very violent past but learned to control it by controlling their emotions.”

“Should people control their emotions?” I asked.

“Sometimes, you have to, I suppose. You have to avoid thinking of what upsets you. If not, it will take over your life. I know. . . .”

She meant Danielle, her thinking about Danielle. I wanted to find out more about what had happened to her. Had Zach drugged her? Why? But by the time I went upstairs, I was tired, so tired. I thought it was the altitude, ’cause I just fell into bed and slept with no trouble, the first time since Tyler died.

But a few hours later, I woke once again to an eerie voice, singing on the wind.

It wasn’t the Star Trek theme. It came from outside my window.

I bolted up and walked across the room, thinking maybe it was Danielle. But there was no one there, only the voice.

10

Rachel

Sometimes, I like to crouch on the floor and look upward, out the window. Then, I can tell if it’s a blue sky, which I know from books means a clear day, the kind of day on which Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters might walk into town in Pride and Prejudice, or a gray sky, which might mean a stormy day, the sort of day on which Jo March in Little Women might huddle under an umbrella with Professor Bhaer.

Not that it matters, for I never go out. But still, I like to know. It makes me feel like a part of the world.

Even though I’m not.

I’ll leave soon, though. I know I will.

I worry that I won’t be ready, that I won’t know the things I need to know and that people (people!) will think me stupid. I’ve been doing exercises, trying to remember what I knew of the outside world. If I read a book, I try to picture the objects mentioned. Some things are easy to envision for they are things I own. Chair. Hairbrush. Picture. Others, I cannot visualize at all. Like,