Towering

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.

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, in Emma , when Mr. Knightley sent his carriage to pick up Harriet, I thought and thought of what a carriage might look like, but I completely failed to envision it. I am certain I have never seen one.
    And then, there are items in the middle, items I might remember if I only try hard enough. Dog. When Mr. Rochester meets Jane Eyre for the first time, he has a dog with him, Pilot. At first, I could not think what a dog might be, though I assumed it was some sort of animal, a furry one like the animals I see from my window, which Mama tells me are called squirrels (the small ones) or deer (the larger ones). But, gradually, if I closed my eyes, if I reached back into the far recesses of my memory, I thought I could remember a creature, larger than I had been at the time. I could feel its rough fur between my fingers, and its tongue on my face. It