Wild Orchid

  My father gave a great cry of anguish.

  “A bargain is a bargain,” the sorceress said, for she had come up the stairs right behind my father. “Come now, little one. Let us see what all the ruckus is about.”

  And she strode to the bedside, plucked me from my mother’s arms, and lifted me up into the light. Now the whole world, if it had cared to look, could have seen what had so horrified my unfortunate maternal parent.

  I had no hair at all. Absolutely none.

  There was not even the faintest suggestion of hair, the soft down of fuzz that many infants possess at birth, visible only when someone does just what the sorceress was doing, holding me up to the light of the sun. I did have cheeks like shiny red apples, and eyes as dark and bright as two jet buttons. None of this made one bit of difference to my mother. She could see only that I lacked her greatest treasure: I had no hair of gold. No hair of any kind. My head was as smooth as a hard-boiled egg. It was impossible for my mother to imagine that I might grow up to be beautiful, yet not like her. She had no room for this possibility in her heart.

  This lack of space was her undoing, as a mother anyway, for it separated us on the very day that I was born. And it did more. It fixed her lack so firmly upon my head that I could never shake it off. For the rest of my days, mine would be a head upon which no hair would grow.

  But the sorceress simply pulled a dark brown kerchief from her own head and wrapped it around mine. At that point, I imagine I must have looked remarkably like a tiny walnut, for my swaddling was of brown homespun. Then, for a moment or two only, the sorceress turned to my father and placed me in his arms.

  “Remember your words to me,” my father said, when he could speak for the tears that closed his throat. “Remember them all.”

  “Good man, I will,” the sorceress replied. “For they are written in my heart, as they are in yours.” Then she took me back and, gazing down into my face, said: “Well, little Rapunzel, let us go out into the world and discover whether or not you are the one I have been waiting for.”

  That is the true beginning of this, my life’s true story.

  About the Author

  CAMERON DOKEY is the author of nearly thirty young adult novels. Her most recent titles in the Once upon a Time series include Wild Orchid, Belle, Sunlight and Shadow, and Before Midnight. Her other Simon & Schuster endeavors include a book in the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies line, How NOT to Spend Your Senior Year. Cameron lives in Seattle, Washington.