Excerpt: The Girl Who Grew Books

The Incredibly Rough Draft

Liam

The book was hidden away somewhere in the house. They weren’t sure where anymore. They should have remembered but though they each tried, the image of it escaped them. And the house was meandering and large. Many dusty corners and empty rooms. They’d tried to look a few times, but given up. Given in to the way their lives had changed. And what would they do if they found the book anyway? They certainly would never read it. Reading it was what had cursed them in the first place. Seemed a great risk to read the thing again.

Liam tried to remember how they’d come to have the book. He was always buying books. Stacks of unread books were all over the house. Shelves sagged under their weight. Perhaps the book had always been mixed in with the others. Perhaps it had come with the house and it had simply taken years for it to make itself known. You didn’t just find a book like that. It made itself known. Appeared on a table one day waiting for someone to pick it up and turn a page.

Then it had you. Liam sighed and went down the stairs. In the light of day he never thought about the book. Maybe on a gloomy day, a day without sun, his fingers would tingle as if the pages were still in his hand and the smell of old paper would drift over him. But he lived in the Sunshine State and luckily long spells of gloom were few.

But of course every state had night. There wasn’t that much sunshine anywhere. Except the poles. But then you’d have night for months and the mere idea of that made his stomach churn.

Liam didn’t know why he was alive. He thought that if you went too long sleep deprived that you were sure to die. He’d read about a family in Italy with a sleeping sickness. Or lack of sleep. Once afflicted, one died. But Liam hadn’t lost weight and changed color. At night it was true his skin cast a gray hue, but in the light of day no one ever thought he looked he tired. He had no bags under his eyes. He didn’t yawn excessively. He didn’t even always feel tired. Well, he never felt tired. But he always wanted sleep. Sleep. Like he’d been addicted to it before and not even known it and was now going through withdrawal.

Faye

Fay slept well every night. She slept soundly. Thunder storms, ringing phones, smoke alarms—nothing woke her. But every morning when she woke her hair was grown during the night. Grown inches. Sometimes ten inches. Sometimes twenty. The better she felt the longer it grew. Once she woke up and it had grown from the base of her neck to the back of her knees. She didn’t cut it every morning, but that morning she was afraid what would happen if she waited. What if it grew to twice her length? What if she became entangled in it while she slept? What if it strangled her?

She learned to sleep perfectly still, on her side, unmoving. She read that the less you moved in your sleep the more vivid your dreams. This seem to be true. When she learn to sleep still, her dreams became wilder. Brighter.
Liam accused her once of stealing his dreams, taking his sleep. They had to go somewhere, right? he had said. And you have more than your share.

She lifted her hair and waved the long ponytail at him. You want this instead? It didn’t take long for her to have more hair than she could throw away. She was afraid to throw it away. She was afraid birds would steal strands and use it for nests. I’ll always have headaches, she said.

Faye was afraid someone would steal it and use it for something strange. She’d heard of people with hair fetishes. Obsessions. What if some strange man had her hair? Then maybe there was someone who didn’t like her. She couldn’t think of anyone, but just supposing someone like that did get a hold of her hair. Think of the damage they could do.

Kell

Kell didn’t leave the house. She couldn’t. Or thought she couldn’t. She was afraid—and so were Liam and Fay—that if she left someone would take too much notice of her. That she’d be carted off. Studied. Asked questions. She didn’t want to be looked at.

Whenever anyone spoke to her, or rather, whenever she heard someone speak, their words appeared on her skin. They words scratched sometimes. Some words scratched more than others. If that person talked on and on, her body would be covered in lines and it could take days to fade. Weeks if the person spoke with great emotion.

If many people spoke, then the words would overlap, forming elaborate designs. The worse was when they words appeared across her face. Then she’d hide in her room for days.

No TV and no radio. No songs. No voice of any kind. From time to time she let Liam or Fay speak to her, but mostly they gestured, and left her notes on paper. She didn’t like the sound of a pencil or pen. The sound of letters made her skin itch. She spent most of time in silence. She tried to listen to classical music, but she hadn’t liked classical music before the curse, afterwards was no different.

But Fay and Liam would search the music stalls at the flea market and find CDs of instrumental music, something that might engage her attention. She missed voices. She learned after a while that she could give someone something to read, something she liked, and end up with a favorite poem running down her back or a favorite saying up her arm. But the novelty of that wore off, and mostly she wanted clear skin. Unmarred. Empty. Blank.

Kell spent a lot of time in her room. She liked to sleep, but even that was no relief. If she was asleep and someone in the room spoke, or even whispered, she’d wake up to find the words on her legs. Or her arms. She could feel them on her back. Even if she wasn’t aware that someone was speaking, if her body sensed it, and the words would appear. Telling secrets too close to her was dangerous. They would show up around her stomach. Between her thighs. They made her cry.

And it was all because of the book.