Towering

was right. I had found her for a reason. It was meant to be.
    “Besides,” I said, “I barely remember anything about Caroline, except that she wasn’t as beautiful as you.”
    She led me to her sofa and sat down, then kissed me. “I wasn’t worried. You are my destiny. I have seen your face in my dreams.”
    “I’ve seen your face before too, but not just in a dream. Let me show you.”
    I opened my backpack and removed the carefully folded yearbook page. “Here. I found this. I think . . . I’m sure this is your mother.”
    She stared at it, stunned. “It is me . . . just like me.” She shook her head, then looked back at the photo. “Who is she? Where did you find it? It is me! But it cannot be me because I have never seen this place.” She pointed to the background, the school.
    “Her name was Danielle Greenwood. She was the daughter of the woman I’m staying with. They say she disappeared about seventeen years ago, right around the time you were born.”
    “That is so sad.” She touched the photograph with one finger, reverent as if it was one of the religious icons in the churches I’d visited on vacations. “But to have her picture, like she was a truly real person, a mother who might have given me cookies when I came home from school instead of a pretend character in a book. I can’t quite believe it.”
    “She was real all right. She kept a diary—I brought that too. And I think your mama is right to protect you, to tell you to stay hidden. Okay, the tower’s a little weird, but . . .”
    She tore her eyes from the photo. “I know, I know. But I wish I could be a normal girl, like everyone else. Go to school. Would your friends like me?”
    It was hard to look at her without wanting to touch her, to stroke her hair. But it wasn’t like our relationship was only physical. “Of course they’d like you. You’re so sweet, and . . .” I stopped, wondering if that was true, if people would see her as I did, or if they’d just think she was odd. Sometimes, people at school wanted everyone to be the same and think the same. But she was so beautiful, and somehow, her very strangeness was what I loved about her, that she made me feel less weird.
    I wondered, maybe, if everyone felt weird sometimes, if they just didn’t tell anyone.
    “And what?” she asked.
    “And you’d have me. I think the coolest thing about you is that you didn’t go to my school. You’re different, unspoiled.”
    “Of course.” She touched my hand. “But tell me about it, your school. The books Mama brings me, they seem very old. I worry that it might not be the same.”
    I tried to think how to explain school to someone who’d never been. It was strange. I wished we could watch a movie or something. “What do you want to know?”
    “Everything. Start with the first thing you do in the morning. Do you walk there?”
    Somehow, I knew she was picturing Little Women or Little House on the Prairie , one of those books girls liked. “No. I live too far. I drive now—I mean, when I went, but when I was younger, I took the bus.”
    “And a bus is . . . ?”
    I laughed. “It’s a vehicle. It picks you up near your house. It’s big and yellow . . . orange and ugly. A lot of people sit in it, fifty or sixty, two on each seat.”
    “Sort of like a train?”
    “Not as cool as a train.”
    She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I remember a train once, before Mama brought me here. It was nighttime, and we had a private compartment, away from everyone else. Mama wouldn’t let me come out. She was too afraid. I felt sick, and she told me to look out the window, that moving while looking at the other stuff, not moving, was what made me sick. But if I saw movement, I’d feel better. She was right. I stared out, and most of the time, there was nothing outside—just like my window here. But, sometimes, there were towns and houses and stores lining the track. You could tell the name of each town by the signs on the businesses and the post office. Finally, I went to sleep, and when I woke, Mama was carrying me away.” She stared off, remembering. Finally, she said, “So you went on the big yellow-orange ugly bus. Were your friends on the bus too?”
    “A lot of them.” I thought of Tyler and Nikki. We’d waited for the bus together, of course.
    “It sounds wonderful.”
    Sitting there, in the still room, I could almost smell the bus exhaust, hear the farting sound the vehicle made when it