“I don’t think they’ll live much longer anyway,” Mrs. Greenwood said while we watched the news (which, conveniently, came right before Star Trek). “They were eighty if they were a day, even when I was a young girl. Obviously, they derived some sort of power from the rhapsody. It prolonged their lives.”
“And strength,” I said. “That old guy broke my arm.”
“Now that it’s gone, I suspect they will be too.”
I hoped so.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why I could communicate with Rachel. I mean, when she was in her tower. I heard her, and no one else could.” I remembered New Year’s Eve. Everyone else had been just as close to the tower as I was, but they were sure it was only a loon or maybe the wind. They didn’t hear anything.
“I’d thought about that myself.” Mrs. Greenwood paused the television just as the starry background came onscreen, before the announcer said, Space: The final frontier. “And the only thing I could think was that it was Danielle.”
“Danielle?” I said at the same time Rachel said, “My mother?”
“Yes. Rachel, I told you I had seen Danielle in my dreams, just a few months ago. She came in a dream and spoke clear as day. She said that Wyatt should come here, that he could help Rachel to fulfill the prophecy. I brushed it off, but the next day, Emily Hill called me.”
“She did?” I said.
“Out of the blue. I mean, we’d exchanged Christmas cards, and once, she came up to visit. But I hadn’t heard her voice in years. But that day, she asked if Wyatt could come stay here.”
“Did she know?” I asked. This was a big shock to me. I thought she’d just wanted to send me here to get me out of town.
Mrs. Greenwood nodded. “Just yesterday, I asked her, and she said she had had the same dream. She just hadn’t told me about it because she thought I’d freak out.”
“Good call,” I said.
“And then, when you came, you saw Danielle yourself.”
“Twice,” I said.
“Twice?”
Oops. I hadn’t told her about the second time. “So you think she, what, facilitated my communication with Rachel? Like a ghost or something?”
“A ghost or maybe a vision. I think she loved Rachel and wanted to help her, somehow.”
At this point, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that had happened. Not by a long shot. I said, “Do you think she’ll be coming back again?”
Mrs. Greenwood shook her head. “I don’t think so.” And then, she un-paused the television, the announcer’s voice, blasting: These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
The rest of the week, the town saw more action than it had probably seen in twenty years, as the police solved numerous missing persons cases, including finding Bryce Rosen, the guy on the Missing Person flier outside Hemingway’s. Dateline NBC was there and every news station in the country. Parents flocked to pick up their children, all believed dead, some for as long as thirty years. The Fox brothers had held them all this time, and now they were released, some to loving families, others to rehab centers.
And Mrs. Greenwood was right. The only one who wasn’t found was Danielle.
“Suzie told the truth,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “She really is gone. I never fully believed she was. I guess that’s why I never cleaned out her things. I should do it now.”
Rachel had been staying in Danielle’s room since she came home. We looked at each other and said, “We’ll do it,” because we knew it would be too painful for her.
“Thank you.”
One thing that hadn’t changed about Rachel was her hair. It was still short, and it wasn’t growing. Or, I guess, it was growing at a normal rate, not a crazy one. Her magical tears too were gone now that they had served their purpose. And if I wanted to talk to her, I had to go find her.
Which wasn’t that hard, since we were both living at Mrs. Greenwood’s house for now. We had both started classes at the local school, not online, so we had to wait until Saturday to clean out the room. That morning, we put Danielle’s things in bags, some for the garbage, some for charity, some for Hemingway’s junk shelves, “Because, really,” I said, “you never know when someone might want a pair of shoe skates—some people might think in-line skates are dumb.” And some things, like old yearbooks and photographs, Rachel kept for herself.
Rachel took out one of the desk drawers so she could go through it. When she tried to put it back, it wouldn’t go in. “Check underneath,” I said. “Sometimes, something gets stuck in the tracks.” I had to tell her things like this all the time, because she’d never done normal stuff like other people did. Even the dishwasher fascinated her completely, and she kept putting dishes in so she could run it and see them come out clean.
Rachel held the drawer up and looked under it. She drew out a blue envelope.
She looked at it, then gasped.
In what I recognized as Danielle’s handwriting, the letter was addressed to Rachel.
Dear Rachel,
I am writing this to you because I know you will be born, and I know you’ll be a girl. I’m going to tell whoever takes you to name you Rachel because that’s my favorite name.
I hope that you’ve grown to be a beautiful young woman when you read this. I know that I probably won’t be around, and that makes me sad, but it also makes me happy that I could have you. We all have our destinies. Mine was to be your mother, and I hope that was enough. Yours is to be someone special, heroic, and I hope that, since I am your mother, that makes me a heroine as well.
About your father. I met him when I was a teenager. We fell in love, and then, he left me. But he sent me a letter not long after. He told me that you would be an incredible person. You would have healing powers and strength, and you will change everything for many people. I hope you will have enough strength for what you need to do. And I hope you will have help.
I loved your father very much. I hope that you will meet someone, someone like him, who will show you all the beauty of the wonderful world.
Your father also told me to be careful. I am trying, but I don’t know if it will be enough. If it isn’t, I want you to know I love you, my baby.
Your mother,
Danielle
“And did I?” I said after we had both finished reading it.
“Did you what?”
“Show you the wonderful world?”
“You did. You showed me everything, everything I’ve ever seen. You saved my life.”
I kissed her. “And you saved mine right back. Several times now.”
She looked around the room with its boxes and bags everywhere. Her eyes fell upon the window. “Oh, look, it’s snowing,” Rachel said.
“Then I guess there’s only one thing for us to do,” I said. “Make an angel!”
Author’s Note
Rapunzel was one of my favorite fairy tales when I was a child (long before it was a Disney movie—people, Disney did not write these stories!), to a degree that I once tried to write a musical version of it in high school. As soon as I finished writing Beastly, I started on a version of Rapunzel. I thought that, as here, rapunzel would have to be a drug. Why else would a mother give her baby away for it?
However, it was difficult to write a book in which the heroine is trapped in a tower; more difficult still if I tried to let her out. I ended up putting it down.
Then, one day, my husband was watching the History channel, and instead of wars, they started talking about Greek mythology, specifically, the story of Danaë, mother of Perseus. Like Rapunzel, Danaë was kept in a tower. But there, it was because of a prophecy that she would bear a son who would kill her father. She had to be stopped from bearing that fateful child. However, as anyone who has read mythology knows, you can’t stop a prophecy, so Zeus came to her in a shower of gold and impregnated her. (My husband says that ancient Greek girls who got pregnant must have told their parents, “Really, Dad, it wasn’t Konstantine! Zeus came to me in a shower of gold!”)
I had read this story in high school, but now, it seemed like the History channel was talking to me. Several months later, I was driving to New York City with my kids to see the musical Shrek (another princess in a tower story), and my daughter, Katherine, was reading her required summer reading book aloud. It was Edith Hamilton’s mythology, and it was the story of Perseus and Danaë. I knew I was meant to write this book. This does show how long these stories have been with us—Danaë was likely the original Rapunzel. Or, perhaps, there was a Rapunzel even before that.
For more information on fairy tales, visit www.surlalunefairytales.com. It has all the classic stories and even merchandise.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Antonia Markiet, also, Rachel Abrams, Phoebe Yeh, and my agent, George Nicholson.
Thanks to Debbie Fischer and Joyce Sweeney, for reading an earlier version of this and telling me it wasn’t that bad (even though it was).
Special thanks to Heather Rivera, for allowing me to do belay training with the moms in her Girl Scout troop and writer, Elisa Carbone, for giving me rock climbing advice, so that snobby rock climbers like her (her words) wouldn’t talk trash about my book.
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Also by Alex Flinn
BEASTLY
A KISS IN TIME
CLOAKED
BEWITCHING
BREATHING UNDERWATER
DIVA
FADE TO BLACK
NOTHING TO LOSE
BREAKING POINT
About the Author
Gene Flinn
ALEX FLINN loves fairy tales and is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Beastly, a spin on Beauty and the Beast that was named a VOYA Editor’s Choice and an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers. Beastly is now a major motion picture starring Vanessa Hudgens. Alex also wrote A Kiss in Time, a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty; Cloaked, a humorous fairy-tale mash-up; and Bewitching, a reimagining of fairy-tale favorites, including Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, and The Little Mermaid, all told by Kendra—the witch from Beastly. Her other books for teens include Breathing Underwater, Breaking Point, Nothing to Lose, Fade to Black, and Diva. She lives in Miami with her family. Visit her online at www.alexflinn.com.
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Credits
Cover art © 2013 by Howard Huang and Adam Brown
Cover design by Sasha Illingworth
Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
TOWERING. Copyright © 2013 by Alex Flinn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flinn, Alex.
Towering / Alex Flinn. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “A contemporary retelling of Rapunzel told from the alternating perspectives of three teens whose fates unknowingly bind them together to destroy a greater evil”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-202417-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-06-202418-3 (lib. bdg.)
ISBN 978-0-06-227632-2 (international ed.)
EPub Edition April 2013 ISBN 9780062209214
[1. Fairy tales. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Blessing and cursing—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Drug abuse—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ8.F5778Tow 2013
2012051742
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
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13 14 15 16 17 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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Alex Flinn, Towering
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