Sweetly

Book 0: Fairy Tale Retelling

by Jackson Pearce

Genres: YA Fairy Tales & Folklore

Synopsis

As a child, Gretchen's twin sister was taken by a witch in the woods. Ever since, Gretchen and her brother, Ansel, have felt the long branches of the witch's forest threatening to make them disappear, too. Years later, when their stepmother casts Gretchen and Ansel out, they find themselves in sleepy Live Oak, South Carolina. They're invited to stay with Sophia Kelly, a beautiful candy maker who molds sugary magic: coveted treats that create confidence, bravery, and passion. Life seems idyllic and Gretchen and Ansel gradually forget their haunted past -- until Gretchen meets handsome local outcast Samuel. He tells her the witch isn't gone -- it's lurking in the forest, preying on girls every year after Live Oak's infamous chocolate festival, and looking to make Gretchen its next victim. Gretchen is determined to stop running and start fighting back. Yet the further she investigates the mystery of what the witch is and how it chooses its victims, the more she wonders who the real monster is. Gretchen is certain of only one thing: a monster is coming, and it will never go away hungry.

Release date: August 23, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 330

Sample

The book said there was a witch in the woods.

That’s why they were among the thick trees to begin with—to find her. The three of them trudged along, weaving through the hemlocks and maples, long out of sight of their house, their father’s happy smiles, their mother’s soft hands.

A sharp ripping sound bounced through the trees. The boy whirled around.

“Sorry,” one of the girls said, though she clearly didn’t mean it. Her cheeks were still lined with baby fat and her hair was like broken sunlight, identical to the girl’s standing beside her. She held up the bag of chocolate candies that she’d just torn open. “You can have all the yellows, Ansel, if you want.”

“No one likes the yellows,” Ansel said, rolling his eyes.

“Mom does,” one of the twins argued, but he’d turned his back and couldn’t tell which one. That was how it normally was with them—they blended, so much so that you sometimes couldn’t tell if they were two people or the same person twice. The sister with the candy emptied a handful of them into her palm, picking out the yellows and dropping them as they continued to trudge forward.

“When we find the witch,” Ansel told his sisters, “if she chases us, we should split up. That way she can only eat one of us.”

“What if she catches me, though?” one of the girls asked, alarmed.

“Well, what if she catches me, Gretchen?” Ansel replied.

“You’re bigger. She should chase you,” the other sister told him, pouting. “That’s the way they work.” She was the only one who claimed to know the ways of witches—she was the one with the stories, the made-up maps, the pages and pages of books stored away in her head. She reached into her twin’s bag of candy and pegged Ansel in the back of the head with a yellow candy. He didn’t react, so she prepared to throw another one—

“Wait… do you know where we are?” he asked.

One of the twins raised her eyes to the forest canopy and scanned the closest tree trunks, while her sister turned slowly in the leaves. They knew these woods by heart but had never ventured quite so far before. The shadows from branches felt like strangers, the cracks and pops of nature turned eerie.

The twins simultaneously shook their heads and their brother nodded curtly, trying to hide the fact that being out so far made him uneasy. He hurried forward, eager to keep moving.

“Ansel? Wait!” one asked, and ran a little to close the space between them. “Are we lost?”

“Only a little,” he answered, jumping at the sound of a particularly loud falling branch. “Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not,” she lied. She began to wish she’d packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their adventure, instead of two Barbies and a bag of candy, which Gretchen had almost finished off anyway. What if they were stuck out here past dinnertime?

“Besides,” Ansel said over his shoulder, “maybe she’ll be a good witch, like Glinda, and help us get unlost.”

“I thought you said she might want to eat us.”

“Well, maybe, but we won’t know until we find her. Unless you want to go back,” Ansel said. He didn’t entirely believe the stories about the witch, but his sisters did and he didn’t want to ruin it for them. Another pop in the woods made him jump; he shook off the nerves and sang their favorite song, one from a plastic record player that had been their father’s.

“In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, you never change your socks.” The twins began to hum along, adding words here or there, until they got to the line all three of them loved and they sang in unison.

“There’s a lake of stew and soda, too, in the Big Rock Candy Mountain!” The familiar words calmed them, made things fun again, as though their combined voices swept the fear away.

Ansel was about to begin another verse when a new noise came from farther in the forest—not a pop, not a crack, but a footstep. A slow, rolling foot on dried leaves, then another, then another. He grabbed his sisters’ hands, one of their sticky palms in each of his. The bag of candies fell to the ground and scattered, rainbow colors in the dead leaves.

They waited. There was nothing.

And yet there was something—there was something, something breathing, something dripping, something still and hard in the trees. Ansel’s eyes raced across the trunks, looking for whatever it was that he was certain, beyond all doubt, had its eyes locked on them.

“Who’s there?” Ansel shouted. His voice shook, and it made the twins quiver. Ansel was never scared. He was their big brother. He protected them from boys with sticks and thunderstorms.

But he was scared now, and they were torn between wonder and horror at the sight.

Nothing answered Ansel’s question. It got quieter. Birds stilled, trees silenced, breath stopped, his grip on his sisters’ hands tightened. It was still there, whatever it was, but it was motionless, waiting, waiting, waiting…

It finally spoke, a low, whispery voice, something that could be mistaken for wind in the trees, something that made Ansel’s throat dry. He couldn’t pick out the words—they were torn apart, and they were dark. Low, guttural, threatening.

The words stopped.

And it laughed.

Ansel squeezed his sisters’ hands and took off the way they had come. He yanked them along and ran fast as he could, over brush and under limbs. The twins screamed, a single high-pitched note that ripped through the trees and swam around Ansel’s head. He couldn’t look back, not without slowing.

It was behind them. Right behind them, chasing them.

Gretchen stumbled but held tightly to Ansel, let herself be dragged to her feet just as something grasped at her ankles, missed. They had to move faster; it was coming, crunching leaves, grabbing at the hems of their clothes.

It’s going to catch us.

The twins slowed Ansel down—their joined hands slowed everyone down. They’d promised to split up so the witch could eat only one of them, but now…

It’s going to catch us.

Ansel lightened his grip, just the smallest bit, and suddenly his hands were free and the three of them were sprinting through the trees. The thing behind them roared, an even darker version of the words they’d heard earlier.

Both twins knew the other couldn’t run much longer. Did Ansel know the way out?

Candy.

On the ground, yellow candies. Ansel was following them, slicing around trees while the twins followed along desperately, eyes focused on finding the next piece, the trail back to the part of the forest they knew. The monster leapt for one of the twins, missed her, made a breathy, hissing sound of frustration. She dared to glance back.

Yellow, sick-looking eyes found hers.

She turned forward and sped up, faster than the others, driven by the yellow eyes that overpowered the sharp aches in her chest, her legs begging for rest. There was light ahead, shapes that weren’t trees. Their house, their house was close—the candy trail had worked. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore, her lungs were bursting, eyes watering, cheeks scratched, but there was the house.

They burst from the woods onto their cool lawn. Get inside, get inside. Ansel flung the back door open and they stumbled in, slamming the door shut. Their father and mother ran down the stairs, saw their children sweaty and panting and quivering, and asked in panicky, perfect unison:

“Where’s your sister?”



There are lights at the surface.

Lights so unlike the sun, that can’t reach down into the depths of the ocean. Lights we can see only when we look outside the water. She turned the thought over and over in her mind, imagining the lights as best she could until she had to ask her sisters for help again.

“What about the carnival? Are the lights on the rides? What are the rides?” she asked one of the oldest, who just turned away—that sister rarely spoke anymore. Lo sighed, turning back to one of the younger ones, whose first trip to the surface was more recent. “Tell me, Ry?”

“Lights. Lights everywhere, I think on the rides. I don’t know what the rides are called anymore,” Ry said, sounding irritated at the notion of lights. “And noise. Really, Lo, it’s nothing to be excited about. It’s not the way you remember it.”

That was what they kept telling her—it wouldn’t be the way she remembered it. Because the last time she saw the human world, she was human.

She walked on land and sat in the sun and sometimes went so far inland, she couldn’t even see the ocean. These were things she barely remembered, things that felt like dreams and grew fainter and fainter each day she spent underwater with her new sisters.

The girls here weren’t her real sisters, but sometimes she convinced herself they were. When they streaked through the water, laughing, minds linked by some sort of electric current that skipped through the ocean, when they’d been under so long that they forgot a human world existed… then they were her real sisters, her real family, and this was her real home.

But even as she forgot her old life—first the strongest memories, then the moments between, and then the smallest details of who she was—there was one thought, one memory that never left the recesses of her mind: She’d been happy as a human, happier than she was now underwater. And that tiny thought refused to let Lo fully embrace a lifetime under the waves. She had to at least look back to the human world.

Once every deep tide—every fifteen months—the sisters surfaced together. Some to remember, most to remember why they forgot. Why the ocean took the memories of their old lives one grain at a time, the same way the tide pulled the shore out to sea. Why the ocean took their souls. Turned them from humans into… this.

There are lights at the surface. I just need to see them, and I’ll never forget what they look like again, Lo told herself. She still felt it was better to remember, to know what she was missing. Most of her sisters had long decided that it was easier to forget.

“Ready?” one of the oldest sisters asked. Her voice was bell-like, musical. All the old ones were beautiful, from their voices to the palms of their hands. They would grow more so every day, until the day they’d float away with the low tide, or maybe in a storm, and never be seen again. They became angels, according to the stories. Most of her sisters believed the angel tale, that old ones went to the surface and were greeted by beautiful men, beautiful women who welcomed them into the sky. Lo had her doubts—most of the girls her age still did, but as they grew old, their doubts faded until they believed steadfastly. She wondered how many days, months, tides this sister had left.

“Is it time?” Lo asked.

“As soon as you feel the tide coming in. Any moment now…”

The old sister paused, waited for the tiniest shift in the ocean, in herself. Changes Lo hadn’t noticed when she first arrived, changes she suspected only creatures of the water could appreciate. Lo found the water more marvelous every day, found living in it to be more perfect, more wonderful….

But she still wanted to remember.

The ocean shifted; her sisters rose and slipped upward like a single creature. She followed, the old sister just behind her, waiting for them to call her back, to hold her down to the seafloor like they’d done when she first arrived and fought to break the water’s surface for weeks and weeks. But no, it was time. She was several months into her new life; she could be trusted to glimpse the old one. The weight of the water above them grew less and less until…

Lo gasped, dry air filling her lungs. It hurt, but she grinned and forced her eyes open despite the wind. Wind—she remembered wind. Standing in a field near a tiny house, people behind her, her family. When she first arrived at the ocean, she would pick out the most beautiful shells from the ocean floor, send them away in the waves, and hope her family would find them. She would imagine they’d see them, know they were from her, know she was alive… and now, she couldn’t remember their faces. She couldn’t even remember how many family members she had.

The lights. I need to see the lights, she thought firmly—maybe they’d remind her of her family. She looked up at the stars, the moon, and finally the shore. Two bright lights shone from a spot in the sand, moving along slowly, waving back and forth—

Hands—they were handheld lights, grasped in the palms of humans walking side by side. Walking. I used to walk, she thought, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking how ungainly it looked compared with being in the water. She swam forward a little, silent, to get a better look.

A boy and a girl, laughing, talking, the sounds barely audible over the crashing waves. Brilliant-colored lights in pinks, reds, greens, yellows, from the carnival beyond the pier, bounced off their faces—all that light, and yet the two of them somehow looked brighter in comparison. They looked warm. They shone. They looked happy.

“Are you going to try?” one of the sisters asked.

“Him?” Lo answered. “How would I get to him?” The two crossed in front of several houses, then a white building with glowing porch lights, making the couple appear in perfect silhouette.

“You can sing. It works sometimes. And they think we’re beautiful. That helps.”

“But he has her. He’s already in love.”

“Maybe you can break it,” another sister suggested.

“Don’t you want to?” Lo answered, looking back at them. This boy’s soul, why weren’t they fighting over it? They were all older than her, more beautiful, more practiced. Make him love you, kiss him, drown him. Earn his soul, and you get your humanity back—the escape from the ocean that the older girls told her about on her very first day. Yet they were letting her have him, if she wanted.

“Go ahead, Lo,” Ry said.

Lo swallowed. She loved her sisters, but she knew—they all knew—they weren’t originally meant for the sea. And she wanted to remember her former life completely, return to it, before she became old and beautiful and had forgotten her humanity entirely. It won’t be fair, what will happen to the boy, but it wasn’t fair what happened to me, either. That makes it all right, doesn’t it?

She couldn’t remember what happened to her, what turned her into an ocean girl. It was the strongest memory, the first to go. All Lo remembered was standing at the shore of the ocean with a man whose face she couldn’t remember. Her body ached, and there was a jagged wound over her heart. The man sent her into the ocean, told her the other girls would find her. He was one of the angels, Ry told her when she arrived.

Lo doubted that as well.

She touched the scar on her chest, almost faded entirely. There was a voice in her head telling her to stop, to turn back, but she ignored it and swam closer, closer to where the waves crashed against the shore.

Sing, a different voice said. A voice that longed to be human again, the voice of the girl she used to be.

The sisters sang all the time, songs that melded together to form one voice that made the ocean thick with music. Lo opened her lips, let the notes emerge.

The boy stopped first, then the girl. They looked at the ocean. Did they see her? The thought was exhilarating, dangerous. She sang louder; behind her, she heard her sisters join in, voices quiet, guiding her along in the song.

The boy stooped to set his light down in the sand, pointing at the ocean, talking with the girl. He waved at Lo, big arms over his head. He saw her. He sees me; he’s coming for me—yes, he took tentative steps into the water. Come, where it’s deeper, please….

The girl yelled, shouted, tried to pull him back, but he took another step, another, another. The song grew louder. Lo extended her hand in the moonlight. He had a handsome face, sharp features like a statue. His clothing, now soaked, clung to his body as he reached toward her.

She took his hand. Don’t be scared. When he touched her, more memories of her old life slammed into her mind. Being held by her father, the scent of his cologne. The smell of things baking, the way fire leaped up from kindling. She swallowed hard, held on to each memory as long as possible before looking back to the boy’s eyes.

“Hello,” the boy said. He sounded dazed and blinked furiously. Lo stopped singing, and her sisters’ song grew louder in response.

“Do you love me?” Lo whispered.

The boy looked surprised for a moment. Her sisters sang louder—he was having trouble fighting them. “I…” He looked back to the girl on the shore. “I love her. The girl by the church, I love her.”

Lo’s jaw stiffened; her fingers on the boy’s hand tightened. “No, no, you love me.”

The ocean shifted again, and some of her sisters stopped singing, started whispering. They were tired of the air touching their skin; they wanted to go back under—they wanted to leave. Lo bit her lip, ran her fingers along the boy’s shirtsleeves. Fabric hanging on a clothesline, laundry being folded, the way towels felt drying off her skin, more memories that proved even harder to hold on to. They skirted out of her mind like little fish, then darted back to the recesses they came from. Forgotten.

By the next deep tide, I’ll have forgotten everything, just like them, she thought, glancing back at her sisters. That’s why they didn’t want the boy for themselves. They don’t care about their souls anymore. I won’t care in another fifteen months.

Now. It has to be now. Be brave. It has to happen.

She pulled the boy closer to her, so that his breath warmed her skin. “Love me.”

“I…”

There was no time. Maybe he loved her already, maybe that was good enough, maybe—the ocean changed again, and the oldest sisters ducked back underwater. Lo inhaled, grasped both edges of the boy’s shirt, pulled him against her lips, and kissed him, pleadingly, sorrowfully, desperately.

Then she pulled the boy under.

He hardly fought at first, still entranced with their song, confused, and she was so much more powerful than him in the water. It was easy to pull him into the deep, down to the ocean floor, so easy that for a minute, Lo was able to forget what she was doing to him. His eyes were growing wider; he began to fight for air, struggle against her. This is it. It’s happening. My soul, I’ll go back—

His eyes rolled back in his head. Lo realized her sisters were everywhere, watching, waiting. She leaned over the boy and kissed him again as the last precious bit of oxygen left his lips and floated to the surface.

And then he was dead.

And nothing else had changed.

Lo stared at her hands, at her feet, waiting for the pale blue color to turn back to shades of peach and pink. Waiting for the urge to surface, to gulp air happily, to swim to the shore and run on the sand.

It didn’t come.

“Everyone has to try it for herself,” Ry said gently, swimming closer. The boy’s body listed on the ocean floor like seaweed. Lo felt sick; she doubled over and hid her head. “We all did. But it never works. You can’t make them love you that fast.”

“I don’t think it’s even real, that you can get your soul back,” an older girl added. “It’s a fairy story. Oh, Lo, don’t cry. You have us. You don’t need their world now. You don’t have to worry about remembering anymore. You can just be happy here. And one day, the angels will come back for you, and it’ll be beautiful, Lo. It’ll be perfect.”

Lo turned and cried into her sisters’ arms, for her soul, for the boy, for the memories. Her sisters brushed out her hair and held her close. They pushed the boy’s body away so she couldn’t see it. They sang songs and began games to take her mind off what had happened.

But when the night ended and her sisters went to sleep, Lo stared at the sun from deep beneath the waves, at the tiny threads of blue light that made their way through the water, down to where she was.

Her soul was gone for good. The boy was dead, the girl left alone on the shore. And for nothing, nothing at all, other than a fairy tale and a few scattered memories of life on land. Let it go. Let it all go.

And she allowed herself to forget.



The truth is, I can’t believe it took our stepmother this long to throw us out.

She’s never liked us, after all, especially me—she didn’t like the way my father loved me, didn’t like the fact that I perfectly matched the daughter she’d never met but my father ached for, the way I looked like his dead wife when she’d been a teenager. She said she just couldn’t afford to keep us on anymore and, with me having just turned eighteen and Ansel nineteen, was no longer obligated to.

Obligated. We were obligations left behind by a father eaten alive by mourning, remnants of a shattered family.

“Are we in South Carolina yet? I zoned out,” Ansel says, his voice a forced calm as he peers over the steering wheel. Ansel likes to have a plan of attack, like he did back on the football field in high school, but right now, we’ve got nothing more than the clothes in the car and the gasoline in the tank. He doesn’t want me to see him worrying, but the truth is, I’m happy to be gone. I feel freer without a plan in the middle of nowhere than I did back in Washington.

“Yeah, we crossed the border a few hours ago,” I answer, kicking my feet up onto the dash. The backs of my knees are sticky and sweat trickles down my chest—it uses too much gas to r. . .