Towering

pulled my hair but also scared of Mama’s sudden anger. “It was just a little girl.”
    Mama didn’t say anything, so I thought it was okay. But that night, she didn’t brush my hair or braid it. She left it down, and I could barely go to sleep with my hair crawling around like ants and spiders. I knew that in the morning, it might be tangled into a thousand knots, and my head would be raw and bloody from trying to get them out.
    But in the morning, my hair wasn’t knotted. Instead, it was perfectly cropped to a uniform short length like a boy’s. It wasn’t jagged, as if Mama had shorn it herself. Rather, it looked perfectly neat.
    And perfectly ugly.
    Since that day, Mama never brushed my hair with her special brush. When I asked, she said it was lost. My hair grew back again, but not as fast as before. Mama locked me in the house for days, and the next week, we took a long journey on a train, hidden in a special car with our bed the whole time. Then, I was moved to this tower. At first, I loved it. It looked like the castles I’d seen in fairy-tale books, and I pretended that I was a princess, special, who needed to be protected from the world. But, as I grew older, I realized that the tower was not a palace but a prison. Here I stayed, all alone but for Mama’s visits. I tried to prepare for the day I might leave. I didn’t know when that would be. If it would ever be.

Wyatt
    The train station outside was black, and the train window had frost on it. End of the line, or almost. I dug my fingernails into the seat. The wind howled in a way I wasn’t used to, would never get used to, almost like a human voice. If I tried, I could probably decipher the shapes of things I’d seen on a childhood trip upstate. Back then, Mom had been with me, pointing things out: mountains, a cute farmhouse. Now, I was alone, and outside the train there was nothing. Mom had suggested I come here. I didn’t know why. Or I did know why, but I wasn’t sure it made sense. For the past twenty miles or more, I had stared at my own reflection, my dark hair fading into the darker background of the wilderness.
    It wasn’t that I missed home. I hadn’t been away long enough for that, just a few hours on the train. Or maybe I’d been away longer than I thought. “Emotional distance,” the school psychologist would call it, had called it the three times I had been brought in to “discuss things.” Maybe the rest of my life would be like this, a series of train stations, none more meaningful than the others. Maybe that would be better, to be disconnected from everyone, so no one could hurt me—or be hurt by me either.
    But probably, any train station would be better than this. Slakkill, New York, sounded more like a crime than a town. Since leaving Penn Station, with its bright lights, Christmas music, and bustling tourists, the stations had become steadily bleaker until this one: unmanned, freezing, nothing but a platform in the middle of the grim, Adirondack wilderness.
    My copy of Wuthering Heights (required reading for my online virtual school class) had fallen onto the floor when I’d dozed off. I scooped it into my backpack and pulled my duffel bag from the overhead bin. The only other people exiting at Slakkill were a mother with a little girl, staring straight ahead. No one was waiting for me on the snow-covered platform. I used my coat collar to protect my face against the bitter cold.
    Suddenly, the little girl began to scream. “Mommy! Mommy!”
    “Quiet!” the woman said.
    “But I forgot my bunny! My bunny!”
    “What? Then, it’s gone. The train’s leaving.”
    The little girl was crying. The door was still open, and I was closer to it. I dropped my duffel bag on the ground and ran inside the train, not even knowing why I was doing it. The bunny, frayed and more gray than white, was in the middle of the floor. I grabbed it and ran out, nearly slipping on the icy platform. The mother and daughter had already started to leave, though the little girl was struggling and bridging up the way toddlers do when they’re angry. I ran after them. “Here.” I shoved it into the girl’s hands.
    If I’d expected a thank-you, I got none. I said, “Hey, do you know if there’s a pay phone?”
    Maybe the woman didn’t hear me, but I thought she did. In any case, she shielded her daughter’s face with her hands and kept walking to the stairs. Nice. I could have been stuck on the train if the door had closed, stuck