Inspection

The World as It Looks Whizzing Past You

It wasn’t only that K liked to draw, it was that she showed an incredible propensity for the craft at a very young age. At four years old, her rendering of the Turret was so precise that Inspector Krantz had thought it was a photo and brought it to Marilyn, concerned that someone had been photographing the Parenthood. Marilyn, having seen K’s work before, wasn’t fooled for long. But there was a beat, an unhappy jolt of fear she hadn’t felt in many years, as Krantz held the drawing up from across the room and said, What do we do about this?

Marilyn—M.O.M. to her girls—did not show her prized Inspector the fear she felt inside. Rather, she sat stoic and said in a steady voice, K. My K.

Photos of the towers were not allowed. Neither were photos of the acres of pines that separated the two towers. No evidence, she and Richard had agreed upon from the start. No photos, no videos, no tape recorders. If someone were to discover what was going on here in the deep woods of northern Michigan, it would not be by any errant proof the Parenthood had overlooked. It would have to be word against word. Theirs against them.

The long-married couple believed that their denials, bolstered by their money, would be louder in the end.

These were the thoughts that rose in Marilyn’s mind as Krantz waddled across her office and handed her the image that had looked so fabulously realistic from across the room. But up close, she recognized the tiny inconsistencies that marked it as a drawing after all. And there was only one Letter Girl in the Parenthood who could pull that off.

Marilyn smiled, not only because it was often easy to thwart Krantz’s concerns, but because one of her girls was indeed showing early signs that the experiment was going to be an unparalleled success.

How many children in the real world could draw like this? More so, how many four-year-olds actually had the capability but were lacking the tutelage to do so?

The real world was a constant waste of potential.

K HAD BECOME so fond of drawing that by six she was allowed alone time in the Yard, as B and V picked teams for soccer or Yellow Ball, as F and L ran races from the tower to the far end of the cherry Orchard. Yes, K got some exercise in by way of long walks through that same Orchard, but M.O.M. knew that wasn’t quite enough. If K chose to sit and draw her sisters in the Yard, she would have to take the stairs to her seventh-floor room, a floor she shared with B, V, and Y. She’d take them at least twice a day. The elevator was firmly denied her.

At first, the agreement felt odd, of course, as K told B she’d see her downstairs for breakfast, but K quickly became aware of how much downtime there was in a day at the Parenthood. Yes, breakfast started at eight A.M., but when did it really start? How much time did the Letter Girls spend discussing their dreams and studies before the actual food was brought out? This was true of every event, daily or otherwise, from Film Night to Free Swim, story time to class.

The only thing a girl absolutely had to be on time for was the Inspections.

K didn’t miss a thing. And by age eight she was rather fond of the daily up and down. On the way down, she liked imagining how her day would go, and later, on the way up again, she enjoyed comparing those morning thoughts with how the day actually went. Rarely did they mirror one another.

This was, in effect, K’s first reward for dedicating herself to art.

More would come.

Drawing pictures distinguished her from her sisters, not only physically (by way of stairs), but it provided her with a unique identity: No other Letter Girl took to drawing, took to art, like K. For this, she was asked by all her sisters and even some Inspectors to draw their likeness. As gifts. As presents. Inside the Turret, outside in the Yard. By sun during the day, lanternlight at night. Until the walls of K’s bedroom were covered with her own drawings, photo-realistic renderings of each of the Letter Girls and the faces of the Parenthood staff watching over her as she fell contentedly to sleep.

All but M.O.M., who had kindly asked that her face not be drawn. Ever.

K complied, as all the girls complied with everything M.O.M. and the Parenthood decreed. All but one. One unfortunate seven-year-old girl who had been spoiled rotten and sent to the Corner.

J.

K had been particularly fond of her drawing of J and felt great sorrow while removing the tape and taking it down from her bedroom wall. It had hung there for over a year, the drawing having been done in the Yard when the girls were both six, and the space it left behind was glaring, as if it were a frightening facsimile of the Corner door itself.

Am I easy to draw? J had asked, seated on a wicker chair near the boundary of lush pines. A spring wind tousled the girl’s hair. K had tucked it back behind J’s ear many times that day.

Nobody is easy to draw, K said. But I especially enjoy the challenge you present.

J frowned. I hadn’t thought of myself like that. A challenge.

When she took the drawing down, when the Parenthood told her she had to, K saw that she had captured more than just J in the drawing. She’d also captured the look of someone with a secret. To answer J’s original question much later, K thought that J was, indeed, difficult to draw after all. Most girls wore their thoughts at the front of their eyes, but J’s were kept much deeper in her head. And the day K folded the drawing of her sister, now gone, was the day she realized her own potential: She was able to capture not only the surface details, the angles and shading, of those she shared the world with, but what lived inside each of them, too.

Maybe that was why M.O.M. refused to be drawn.

By the time K was ten, the routine of the Yard (in all seasons) included her seated upon a wicker chair, drawing photo-realistic pictures of her sisters, the arms of the chair, the grass, her own fingers, her own knees, her snow boots, snowstorms, and the unfathomably inventive sculptures her sisters created during the Effigy Meet.

Including B’s brilliant slide.

In the winter of their tenth year, B built a slide that wrapped around the entire Turret, with just enough declination to uniformly run from a third-floor window—O’s living room—to the Yard below. The Letter Girls took turns riding it without the use of their hands, their feet, or even a push. K, like everybody else, was very excited to experience it. She stood in line as M took her turn, then L, then U, until, having been sufficiently riled by the seemingly endless screams of her sisters, K stepped to the window and climbed upon B’s creation herself. She lay flat on her back, arms folded as her sister advised, legs straight ahead, her boots pressed to the sides, waiting for the word to go.

You’re gonna love it, B said, justifiably proud. And don’t forget your number one sister made this thing.

How could I forget, K said, her eyes on the winter sky, with you around to tell me?

It was frightening being outside a Turret window, three stories high.

After a characteristic theatrical pause, B said, Go, K brought her boots together, and go she went.

She moved much faster than she thought she would. And the slide walls felt too short. The rush was something close to scary as she zipped toward the first turn, where the ice wrapped around the Turret bricks. It didn’t look wide enough to hold her. K, like her sisters before her, screamed, sure that she was going to go straight off the edge and drop to the hard-packed snow. Instead, she took the turn with enough velocity to give the sensation of being shot from a cannon (something a girl named Susan had done in the most recent Judith Nancy book, A Circus in the Yard) before settling in again between the icy walls and the cold smooth groove B had designed so well. Sisters cheered from every window she passed. And by the time her scream dissipated into the frosty sky, K had taken a second turn, putting her on the opposite side of the tower from where she’d started, on the backside, where she saw an Inspector high up in a leafless tree, pulling aside the branches of another, reaching for a mitten shot there by a catapult of ice. K didn’t realize it at the time, but while eyeing the Inspector, she saw, through the split pines, a spire showing among the many barren treetops. A spire not unlike the one that crowned the very Turret she traveled around so quickly.

K wouldn’t know she’d seen this until much later, when the mysterious spire showed up in her art.

But first, the end of the slide, as it took her at last to the snowy Yard, as her sisters were there to greet her, and as M.O.M., dressed in her formfitting red snowsuit, her black hair peppered with flakes, knelt down to her, reached out a hand to help her up, and said, Maybe you can draw the world as it looked whizzing past you.

THE BURT REPORT: JULY 1, 2018

Bad Decisions, Always, with B

“Because they’re always asking me about it. That’s why.”

K and B sat cross-legged, the game of Boats between them but not plugged in, no nodes connected to their bodies. The blue waters did not rage with the emotions expressed by the Letter Girls. Their individual boats were in no danger. B fingered the line switch, as she’d been doing for many minutes. She was ready to play, but K had halted that with this unexpected conversation.

“What do you mean they keep asking you about it? About what?” B said. She had a way of asking questions that forced a friend to tell the truth. K loved that about her. B was as straightforward as any Letter Girl in the Parenthood.

“Well, it’s like this.” K reached across the carpet for one of her drawings. She brought it back, placed it upon the Boats board. “I’ve been drawing the pines a lot lately.”

“You don’t say.”

“Stop it. What can I do? I’m interested in them. There’s something”—she leaned forward, eyed her own work—“fascinating about the treetops.”

B studied the picture.

“Okay. So?”

“So…what?”

“So what is M.O.M. asking you about?”

“Right here,” K said, bringing her finger over the drawing. “Wait—” She stopped herself. “First, do you see it?”

B scrunched her face the way she did when she was concentrating. An exaggerated emotion. Classic B.

“No,” she said at last. “I don’t see a thing. Treetops, yes. Anything else? No.”

K brought her finger down at last.

“Right there. You see?” She moved her finger enough to reveal the one errant treetop. The one peak in all those peaks that looked just different enough.

B shook her head. “Nope. Still don’t see it. Is this like some kind of art game? An optical illusion?”

“Well, yes. In a way it is.” She turned the drawing so that it faced herself. “If you look close, you’ll see the smallest tethers of bark, frayed edges, at the tip of every treetop but one. See?”

B studied. K saw a light come on in her best friend’s eyes. “Yeah! I see it.” The light went out. “So? So what’s the big deal about a mistake?”

K shook her head. “Well, that’s what caught their attention. I don’t make mistakes. Not like this. I’ve been drawing what I saw out there.”

“Out…there?”

“Yes. I don’t know when, but I saw something and I’ve drawn it ever since. And believe me, M.O.M. would love to know when and how I saw it.” She looked to the drawing. “I hardly realized it was in there myself until the Parenthood pointed it out. Now I see it’s in every one.” She stretched out sideways and plucked a few pieces of paper from the stack on the carpet. “You know me, B. I draw exactly what I see. I just assumed this particular treetop was…different. Look.”

One by one, K showed B the lone barkless tip of the pine in each drawing.

“Okay. I see it. Weird. What does M.O.M. think it is?”

“I don’t know,” K said. She looked to the door. To the windows. She knew that B recognized she was trying to keep a secret.

“What’s up, K? You’re scaring me.”

It was true that the humor had left K’s room. B obviously felt it go.

K got up, paced her room, came back, and knelt before the board. “The first time M.O.M. asked me about it, she and Krantz exchanged a glance. A knowing glance.”

“Ol’ eagle eye,” B said. “Nothing gets past my K.”

“Not much anyway.”

“And so…”

“So it struck me as weird.” She shrugged. “Weird enough to wonder why they were so concerned with this…treetop.”

The two girls looked down at the top drawing together.

“So,” B said. “This is why you’re feeling suspicious. They keep asking you about it. Like you said. Hmm.”

“At every Inspection. And I wouldn’t say I’m suspicious. Just…it’s interesting, isn’t it?”

B shrugged, too. “Yes. And so…”

“So…”

B shook her head. “No, K.”

“Why not?”

“I mean…I don’t…just no.”

“B, hear me out.”

“No!”

“It’s probably just something we’re not supposed to see until we’re older.” K held out her hands, palms up, as if to say, No big deal, right?

Even devoid of an expression, B looked exaggerated. Even her stoic look was overly so.

She got up and went to the door. K didn’t ask where she was going. She knew B was going to her own rooms, that there she would read a Judith Nancy book and that she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking of that one different treetop. Just like K couldn’t. Just like M.O.M. couldn’t.

“Okay,” B said, turning to face K again. “Okay. Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Really?” K got up and went to her. B held out her hands as though warding off a hug.

“Don’t get so excited. It’s probably a tall stick in the ground. Marks some kind of spot. A toilet.”

“A toilet?”

“Well, who knows!”

They laughed.

“You really wanna do it?” K asked. “You know we can get in trouble. And we’ll definitely have to tell M.O.M. in the Inspection that follows.”

“Yes,” B said. “Why not? If your photographic memory captured something interesting, why shouldn’t we act like we’re in a Judith Nancy book and check it out? What are we if we’re not…adventurous?”

“Exactly,” K said. Then, more serious, “Thanks, B.”

“Of course.” B opened the door. “Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow’s Film Night.”

“So? I’d rather make our own film.”

“Wow,” K said. But before she could say any more, B was out into the hall, the door closed behind her.

K walked back to the unplugged Boats board on the carpet. Still standing, she eyed the drawings at her feet.

Tomorrow, she thought. Then she looked out the window, to the pines, and thought the word again, one more time, before thinking it again, one more time.

Tomorrow

Film Night in the Body Hall was an annual highlight for the Letter Girls. When spring finally gave way to summer, most of the girls’ first thought was of the coming Film Night, the one time of the year they experienced moving pictures on a screen. Z suspected the films were written by none other than Judith Nancy, a theory that spread rapidly and was never denied by M.O.M. Nancy was legendary among the girls for her adventure stories that featured Letter Girls all grown up, overcoming obstacles and distractions in the name of achieving their goals. K’s favorite Nancy book was one titled In the Evening, in which Marla Haynes dedicates herself to long hours of study after her sisters have gone to sleep and in doing so cures all her sisters (and herself!) of a disease. But the plot of this particular book wasn’t what resonated so wildly with K and the others; rather, the book was written so well it was breathtaking, with a voice that seemed to whisper directly into their ears.

Did Judith Nancy write the summer films the Letter Girls pined for all year? M.O.M. wasn’t telling, and that was just fine with K. Mystery, she’d come to believe, could be a character all its own.

Nancy or not, Film Night was magic.

And on this night, it was the exact variety of distraction K and B were counting on.

On no other day of the year did the Letter Girls sit unified in the dark, their twenty-five little bodies unseen in the pews. More than one girl fell asleep each year (inexplicably, G simply didn’t care for the films at all), and no Inspector or staff, writer or M.O.M., had ever emerged from the sidelines to wake them. B, who had suggested tomorrow the evening before, was well aware of the opportunity afforded the two girls on Film Night. Two hours of darkness, two hours in which M.O.M. would assume the duo were seated with the others, two hours that ought to be enough to reach the odd treetop in K’s drawings, determine what it was, and get back before their absence was noted. And if they did get caught, the punishment surely wouldn’t be too much; they were conducting an Inspection of their own, after all.

They were dressed for the Body Hall, both in their black slacks and black turtleneck shirts, standing outside K’s rooms. Luckily, neither was slated for Voices that day.

“Let’s go over the plan,” B said.

“Yes.”

They walked to the end of the seventh floor, opposite the Check-Up room door where they’d endured Inspections every morning of their lives. Here, K opened the door to the stairs and said, “We check in like we would any year.”

“Yep. We check in.”

They entered the stairwell. The door closed behind them.

“We wait for the lights to go out.”

“Yep. The lights.”

As their shoes clacked in the stairwell, K tapped B on the shoulder, signaling for her to stop. They both looked over the railing. B looked up, K down. They couldn’t have Inspectors Krantz or Rivers overhearing them. That would certainly derail their adventure. Eyeing the lower stairs, K imagined M.O.M., her dark glasses and dark hair blending into the shadows, looking back up to her.

Let’s talk about this One Tree, K…and this plan of yours, too.

But the girls were alone.

“We need to sneak out before the movie begins, when the Body Hall is as dark as it’s going to get, the moment the lights go out,” K said. They walked in tandem, hand in hand, down the stairs.

“Right,” B said. “And the only door that won’t give us away is the kitchen.”

“Because dinner has been served. Nobody will be in there.”

“And no lights.”

“Yes. That’s it.”

They paused at the door to the first floor.

“You ready, then?” K asked.

“Ready to investigate the only mistake you’ve ever made in a drawing?” B looked to the door. They heard other Letter Girls in the hall. Enthusiastic voices and the patter of so many shoes. The choir had already begun.

“Yes. I’m ready.”

Each placed a palm upon the door, smiled, and pushed it open.

All of their sisters were preoccupied with the movie as they rushed toward the Body Hall doors. Most spoke as they moved. Would it be better than last year’s? Would it be their new favorite film of all time? The anticipation was palpable, and both K and B experienced dips of self-doubt, wanting badly to see the movie themselves. Surely M.O.M. would ask them about it at tomorrow’s Inspection; Film Night was always a Check-Up room topic the following morning. But neither said as much to the other. It was their way: independence wherever they could find it. And both felt like they were starring in a movie of their own, after all, or a Judith Nancy book called, perhaps, Sleuths or Getting to the Bottom of It.

“Hello, K,” E said. E, who was as proper in speech and appearance as any Letter Girl would never want to be. “Hello, B.”

There had long been tension between conservative E and funny B. K nodded, her mind too distant to smile at that tension now.

“You excited for Film Night?” B asked cordially.

E adjusted the hem of her black turtleneck, adjusted her black slacks. She smiled the way only E could: She had information about the movie. “I happen to know the”—she looked both ways for effect before whispering the last word—“title.”

“Oh?” K asked. “Well…what is it?”

“Take your seats, girls.”

K and B both froze, as M.O.M. had seemingly materialized out of nowhere, passing them before entering the hall, walking the center aisle toward the steps, the podium, and the screen. She smiled as she passed, but K caught something else, something that almost brought her to call the night’s mission off.

M.O.M. had winked at her.

Probably it was meant to acknowledge the excitement of the evening, but K couldn’t help thinking it meant something else.

K, dear, tell us if you could: What’s the meaning behind this one treetop, this one here, with no bark?

“Ugly,” E said. Then she crossed her arms and smiled, waiting for K and B to respond. “Girls? Did you hear me?”

But neither really had. Or, rather, distantly.

“Ugly what?” B asked. K noted the defensiveness in her best friend’s voice. As if E were suggesting their plan was…ugly.

“That’s the name of the movie, dingbats,” E said, shaking her head. “What’s wrong with you two tonight?”

Again K considered calling it off. First the wink from M.O.M., now a sister suggesting something was wrong.

But B lit up. “Oh! That’s a fantastic title! And really leaves you wondering!”

“Doesn’t it?” E asked. “Fortunately I hardly relate to the word.” She looked to the other Letter Girls filing into the pews. Then followed them.

With the lush harmonies of Voices so soothing, K and B took the center aisle and slid down the length of a pew as far as they could, wanting to get close to the black kitchen doors.

But they had to step over Q on the way.

“Mind if we pass you?” K asked.

Q’s pale face seemed to float above her black clothes and the shadows in the Body Hall. K knew that particular face well; Q’s frown had been preserved in a drawing on K’s bedroom wall for a few years now.

“Why would I mind?”

“Oh, it’s just a nice thing to say,” B said.

“Sit wherever you’d like.”

“That we will.”

The girls stepped over Q’s outstretched legs and slid at last into their seats. The kitchen doors, out of range of the podium spotlights, looked to K like a black hole in the wall. A tunnel. She thought of the only other tunnel she’d ever heard of in her life. The Glasgow Tunnel below the Turret. And the Corner one had to pass to get there.

“Okay,” B said. “You ready?”

K thought of the Corner. She couldn’t help it. Her idea of it, anyway. Shapes behind the door M.O.M. had long ago described as the one place no Letter Girl ever wanted to go.

It would take a very bad girl to be sent to the Corner. One who’d been spoiled rotten.

K imagined herself rotting from the inside out.

Even Voices couldn’t calm this image down.

“Yes,” she said. But there was trepidation in her voice.

“We don’t have to,” B whispered. “We could just stay put and watch the movie. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”

K tried to smile but couldn’t quite find it. The plan sounded like a good one the night before. But now? Now B sounded as nervous as she did. K had no doubt her sister was imagining her own version of that same wooden door.

“No,” K said. “When the lights go off, before the movie starts. Like we planned. Let’s just…” But fear had built up within her. Real fear. Enough of it to give her pause.

“Know what?” B said. “It’s okay. We’re gonna be fine.”

They looked down the length of the pew at the same time, looked to Q, whose long brown hair hung in front of her face. All the Letter Girls had tried to get to know Q better. The staff included. Nobody more so than M.O.M. But some girls, K had learned, simply didn’t want to be known.

Onstage, a minor squawk of feedback brought the girls to sit up straighter, to focus on M.O.M. at the podium.

“My girls,” M.O.M. began, her voice equal measures tender and direct. Always. The girls of Voices concluded on a bright augmented chord. “Welcome to Film Night at the Parenthood.” The Letter Girls cheered, their voices electric, resonating off the high Body Hall walls. K and B included. “I won’t say much now, as I’ve no mind to stall what you’ve been eagerly awaiting for months. But I do have a few things to point out first.”

K found herself mesmerized as ever by M.O.M.’s tone of voice, her posture, her lithe build, and the way her black hair framed the angles of her face. M.O.M.’s eyes were obscured by her ever-present dark glasses, giving her a sense of heightened acuity; M.O.M. was, it appeared, all-seeing.

K shifted uncomfortably in the pew. B leaned close and whispered, “Forget it. We’ll stay. What were we thinking anyway? Who cares about a treetop with no bark? What was wrong with us?”

K nodded but had not yet given in. She knew this was important, not giving in. She and B could alternate their yeses and nos, but if they were to say no at the same time, the mission would be off.

As M.O.M.’s voice traveled throughout the Body Hall, K found herself swept up in the perfect pitch, the calming tone, the voice of the woman who had guided the Letter Girls all their lives. It was M.O.M. who, long ago, informed the girls that there was such a thing as girls with nobody to care for them. Girls who starved to death in the halls of other towers. Girls who unknowingly took the stairs to the basement of these other towers, to the Corner itself, where, with no one to tell them otherwise, they opened the door.

Years ago, before our time, some less fortunate girls let it out.

It, M.O.M.?

Oh yes. And it took a long, long time to put it back in the Corner again.

K adjusted the neck of her turtleneck.

“K?” B asked.

K turned to her in the semidarkness. “It sounded so fun last night.”

“It did.”

M.O.M. discussed the weekly activities. Athletics in the Yard. A change in diet. The coming exams.

“It still does,” K said. But her voice said otherwise.

“Does it?”

K tried employing a trick sunny Y had taught them less than a year ago.

You can fool yourself into being happy. It’s true. When you don’t feel like smiling…do it anyway. And guess what? You start to feel happy!

At the time she’d said it, both B and K rolled their eyes. Y was easy to poke fun at. Yet here they were, in a moment of big decision, doing just what their impossibly optimistic floor mate taught them to do.

And it was working.

“Yeah,” K said. “Fun. Just…slip out through those doors…”

“Out through the kitchen.”

“Yes. Through the kitchen and out the garbage door and out into the Yard…”

“Out into the Yard.”

“Yes. And from there to the pines and then into the pines…”

“Then into the pines we go.”

“Yes. We go.”

M.O.M. had stopped speaking. To K it looked momentarily like she was eyeing her directly, like M.O.M. had paused to stare at K and B. Like she was about to say, What’s all this about the kitchen doors, the Yard, and the pines?

Instead, she said, “Now, for your viewing pleasure, the Parenthood presents…Ugly.”

The Letter Girls went crazy. P and F got up and clapped. Smiling smartly, M.O.M. stepped from the podium, to the far side of the stage, where she vanished into the black shadows.

And the lights went out.

K knew she and B had maybe fifteen seconds to move. The projector would come alive no later than that. The room would be filled with the light of the titles, the word UGLY in a font larger than any the girls saw all year. She and B would be as obvious as a cherry stain on the carpet of her bedroom.

K moved first. Then B did, too. They slunk along the pew, crouched, then darted quickly across the small space between pew and kitchen doors. At the doors they slowed, until each had a palm against the wood.

Silent, they entered the kitchen. The doors swung to behind them.

B put a hand on K’s shoulder, put her other hand over her own mouth. K heard B’s stifled laughter as the Body Hall lit up through the kitchen doors’ small circle windows. Just in time, then.

The girls watched the titles for a few seconds before stepping deeper into the kitchen. They moved slowly but deliberately, never stopping to look back, to think twice. B knocked her hip against a steel sink just as a cymbal crash erupted from the Body Hall, followed by the first line of dialogue in the new movie.

“Where are you, Franny?” It was the voice of an older woman. “Are you hiding again?”

“Here,” K said. They’d reached the back door. The handle, K thought, felt too big, much bigger than the stairwell. She paused.

“What is it?” B asked.

“I don’t know. What if there’s an alarm?”

A younger voice cried out from the screen in the Body Hall. “But, Mom! I’m soooooo ugly!”

The Letter Girls erupted.

“Maybe we go through the first-floor hall,” B said. “Take the front door.”

It sounded too dangerous to K. Inspectors on patrol.

“Why is the handle so big?” she asked.

“No idea, but maybe you shouldn’t—”

K opened the door.

No alarm. No sound at all.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” K asked. “Lose a leisure book? Eat alone?”

“Quarantine,” a third voice said from the kitchen darkness.

K and B gripped each other’s hands.

M.O.M.

But no. A Letter Girl stepped into the scant moonlight let in through the open door to the Yard.

“Q?” B asked.

“Sorry,” Q said. “I actually couldn’t resist following you. What you were talking about sounded so much more fun than the movie.”

“Q,” K said. “You shouldn’t come with us.”

“Why not?” Q asked, stepping past them, stepping outside. “What’s the worst that can happen, right?” Under the moon she looked somehow more at home. Less the antisocial Letter Girl and more a part of nature. “But you gotta tell me what we’re going to look for,” Q said. “Otherwise I’m just a blind tagalong.”

K and B exchanged glances. What to do?

“Fine,” K said.

“K drew a picture of the pines,” B said.

“Many pictures.”

“And in all of them there’s one treetop that isn’t like the others.”

Q frowned. “Really? That’s what we’re missing Film Night for? A weird tree? Okay.”

“Well,” B said. “It’s more than that. K never draws a mistake.”

Q nodded. “I know that. So?”

“And so…” B closed the kitchen door quietly behind her. As it snapped shut, so did the voice of the mother in the movie playing in the Body Hall. “If it’s not a tree…what is it?”

“Ah,” Q said. She split her frizzy brown bangs, exposing more of her face. “It’s a storage shed.”

“No,” B said. “Too tall. Why would a storage shed need a spire?”

“A spire?” Q asked. She looked up the length of the Turret. They all did.

“Come on,” K said. “We can guess as we go.”

And they went. K, B, and Q, leaving the tower behind, growing increasingly excited with each step toward the trees. More anxious, too, as none had ever done what they were doing. No Letter Girl had ever ventured into the pines without some sort of chaperone, an Inspector, a teacher. K couldn’t deny that she was afraid. Thrilled, yes, interested, of course, but what was she hoping to find?

“It’s an electrical pole,” Q said.

“No,” B said. “The Parenthood wouldn’t be secretive about an electrical pole.”

“Secretive? Hang on.”

Q stopped walking.

“Are we going to get in trouble for this?” she asked. “Like…real trouble?”

B opened her mouth, ready to say no. Instead, she shrugged. “We might. We don’t know.”

Q seemed to think about this. She didn’t look back to the Turret but rather vanished into her hair, as if she had private curtains to deliberate behind. She emerged again with a partial smile. “Okay,” she finally said.

“Okay,” B echoed. “That was…weird.”

They continued deeper until, behind them, the Turret was obscured by so many trunks, so much brown and green, that the bricks and glass were visible the same way the cafeteria was when viewed through the tongs of a fork.

“It’s a marker, then,” Q said. “For buried treasure.”

“That would be great,” B said. “We’d be heroes at the Parenthood.”

“Straight out of a Judith Nancy book,” K said.

“But no,” B went on, pulling aside a particularly long branch. “No buried treasure out here. Why mark it so high? Why not just an X on the ground?”

“It’s a finger,” Q said. The other girls stopped.

“A finger?” K asked. They waited.

Q smiled, her teeth showing white through her hanging hair and the shadows of the trees. “A really long finger sticking up from the ground. A dead body in there.”

K and B looked at one another. B giggled first. Then K. Then they both broke out in full laughter, a half mile from the tower, the Parenthood, their world. It felt good to laugh. It felt great. K and B both placed a hand on each other’s shoulders at the same time. Then Q joined them, a slight hiccup of a laugh at first, until K and B heard the girl’s full laugh for the first time in their lives. It was high and wild, pocked with snorts, and it soared to the top of the pines, as if it might eye the errant treetop for them, like the periscope used by Karen in Judith Nancy’s thrilling book, Look Up, Look Out, Look In. Q’s laughter, or more so her willingness to let loose, was the final piece the other two needed to feel assured that the decision they’d made was a good one. For what was more memorable? A movie called Ugly or the beautiful sound of an otherwise-shy girl laughing from her belly to her chest to the sky?

THEY CONTINUED. FASTER. Guided by B’s compass. And while some stretches were darker than others, most were illumined by the moon. Only twice did they have to pause, hold hands, and head forth as one, emboldened by the chain they made. They discovered that the spaces between the trees were wide enough to fit two at a time, a trick of the eye as, from the Yard, the long tract of forest looked nearly impenetrable. And as they went, each carried a similarly vague idea of a tall brown pole stuck in the ground, a meaningless thing perhaps, a bald and barren tree at best. K started to believe that it wasn’t what they’d find but the finding of it that mattered. According to her watch, they’d been gone only fifteen minutes. Another hour and a half of Film Night back home.

Maybe they’d even catch the end.

“How far do you think it is?” Q asked.

“We don’t know,” B said. “But we can guess.” She stopped in a particularly bright shaft of moonlight filling a particularly open pool of forest. She removed a folded piece of paper from the back pocket of her black slacks.

“You brought one of my drawings,” K said.

“Of course I did.” The three girls huddled together, B holding the drawing out before them. “Based upon its width and height we ought to be able to determine its distance.”

“But we don’t know what it is,” Q said. “It could be something very wide that looks very thin from so far away.”

“True. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it’s the width of a tree.”

“But we don’t know if that’s accurate.”

“We don’t. But it’s something. And Professor Huggins always says that—”

“A little something is better than a lot of nothing,” K and Q said at once.

“Right. So let’s study this drawing. And let’s consider the mystery object. To scale.”

They took ten minutes to do so. Despite their awareness of the inaccuracies of their method, they determined the thing to be between three and four miles away. If they moved at an average of fifteen minutes per mile (slowed by the trees; no straight line out there), they might have enough time to determine what it was, turn back, and slip inside the Body Hall just as Ugly was ending.

“But we gotta keep moving,” B said. “No more calculations. And we won’t be able to stay long with it, whatever it is.”

“And if we haven’t reached it after forty-five minutes of traveling, then we just turn around,” K said.

None of them liked this idea, but K was right. They couldn’t risk missing the return to the Body Hall. They could, of course, tell M.O.M. they were in the Orchard, they were in their rooms, anything other than the truth, but none of them felt comfortable with outright lying.

Not yet.

“Why wouldn’t we just tell her we wanted to figure it out?” Q asked. “I think M.O.M. would be happy to hear that some of her Letter Girls would rather solve problems than watch a film in the dark.”

“Totally,” B said.

“Probably,” K said, thinking of the interest M.O.M. and the Inspectors showed in her drawings. She almost said, But I just don’t like the way they looked at each other. I don’t like the way they keep asking me about the drawings without telling me why.

But she didn’t.

A half hour deep, the sky had brightened, the moon higher than when they’d set out. The girls no longer talked, as the clock they’d set at their last stop proved too thought-consuming to think of anything else. Each in turn imagined the movie playing out in the Body Hall, the arc of the story, as it crested past the first quarter and headed toward the first third, the moment in which they’d better locate their mystery object or turn around, defeated. K and B compared compasses as the summer night sky warmed them, causing both to sweat, both to breathe hard from the constant ducking and pulling branches aside.

Then, as if she hadn’t actually expected them to find anything, B gasped.

“What?” Q asked. But she didn’t have to wait for an answer. B was pointing ahead.

“Lights,” K said.

Not from the moon.

The three girls looked at one another and, without discussing it, used the nearest trees as cover. Whatever they were expecting to find so far out in the pines, it was not something with lights.

“This certainly changes our guesses,” Q said.

B looked to K, and in that moment both felt a seed rattle somewhere inside their bodies; perhaps this experience had the potential to grow into something bigger than either had planned on.

K considered turning around. For the betterment of her sisters. Before she got them into something she hadn’t meant to at all.

“Wait a second,” she said.

“What?” B asked. “We don’t have time.”

“What if what we discover is something we shouldn’t find? What if M.O.M. is worried about what she saw in my drawings because she knows it’s unsafe? For us.”

“Worried?” Q repeated. “You never said she was worried.”

“We did, too,” B said. Then, “Well, we said she was interested. Wasn’t that close enough?”

“No,” Q said.

“Okay,” K said. “Right now we’re out here in the pines. That’s all that matters. And if we turn around right now we might be avoiding something…”

“Something what?” Q asked.

“I don’t know. Something we don’t want in our lives.”

The three looked toward the hazy light that seemed to emerge like fog from the coming pines. Like snowy frost on the eve of the Effigy Meet.

“Well,” B said, stepping ahead. “I for one would like to get to the bottom of this.”

“Me, too,” Q said. “I’m not sure I could turn back now.”

“Our own movie,” B said. “Let’s see how it ends.”

“Our own movie?” K said, relieved that her sisters weren’t scared enough to stop. “What would you call it? That feels like an important question right now.”

Q said, “I’d call it Three Letter Girls and a Discovery.”

“And does it have a happy ending?” B asked.

But her sisters didn’t answer.

The needles were loud under their boots. The branches loud as they pulled them aside.

And the closer they got to the source of the lights, the more the light resembled night in the Yard back home. The floodlights K had tried to dull for so many years, drawing the drapes of her bedroom window before bed.

A few more steps and the light was strong enough to fill the spaces between all the trees, so that it looked to K like the pines broke up the light rather than the other way around. Behind her, B and Q moved steady.

But K saw it first.

The One Tree.

The different treetop.

The spire.

She stopped and pointed, but B spoke first.

“Oh wow. That’s it.”

“That’s it,” K echoed.

“Well, it’s definitely not a bald treetop,” Q said. “It’s a spire.”

“Like the one on the Turret,” B said.

“Exactly the same,” Q said.

“Come on,” B said. “We don’t have much time.”

“How much?” K asked.

B checked her watch. “Five minutes?”

“Really?”

“If we wanna be safe. Yes.”

K advanced first. B and Q followed. Q tapped B on the shoulder. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” she said.

“What do you mean?” B asked. K was getting farther ahead. Her form was cut by the light, then made impossibly slim, before she vanished into the remaining trees that separated them from whatever held the spire.

“If this is something we should know about, M.O.M. would’ve told us.”

“Well, of course! We’ve been saying that the whole time.”

They moved fast then, trying to catch up to K, unable to turn away no matter what sort of eleventh-hour admonishment they felt. They couldn’t hear K moving anymore and found out why, as B ran into her best friend’s back, knocking K out onto a grassy open field. B, stumbling, almost fell after her. Instead, she found her balance and, halfway to standing up, was frozen by the sight of the brick tower rising up, up, up, to the spire so high above them.

“Um, K?”

K was on the ground, on her stomach, also looking up. Not just at the bricks that made up this edifice, that made this a replica of the tower they left behind, the one they had to return to now (now!), but at the windows lit up along the tower’s side. And at the girls who moved about within them.

By the time K rose, B and Q were beside her. All three edged back to the border of the pines.

“This is just like the Yard,” Q said, acknowledging the field of open grass that was all that separated them from the second tower they’d ever seen in their lives.

But K and B weren’t listening to her. And they didn’t take their eyes from those windows.

“Those…girls,” B said.

K didn’t know how to process it any more than B did. Had they gotten turned around? Was this their home?

“I don’t understand,” Q said. And simple as it was, the few words explained perfectly how they all felt.

No, K knew. This was not home.

It was hard to make sense of the short hair, the shirtless girls with flat chests, bony shoulders and necks.

“Look!” B said.

A large woman entered the glass hall on the first floor. Her stomach hung over her belt. Attached to that belt was a magnifying glass.

“She’s dressed like an Inspector.”

Only this one had hair on her face. And moved like no woman the girls had ever seen move.

She slouched like an ogre from Judith Nancy’s Odds and Ends, plodding along the glass hall.

“This isn’t good,” B said. “We have to go now. We have to go tell M.O.M. right now.”

“Hang on,” K said, still staring, unable to pull herself away. The disappointment at having left Film Night was erased entirely by the scene they beheld. The thrill of moving pictures eclipsed by a hidden reality, nonfiction, so close to their own.

“B?” K asked, still staring at the windows. At the huge Inspector lumbering on the other side of the glass.

But B knew no more than she did.

“I don’t feel good about this,” Q said. “At all.”

The big Inspector paused at a drinking fountain, bent at the waist to use it.

Through a window two floors up, K saw two naked backs in the light of a lit living room. Beyond them, a shirtless girl with short hair was talking. Above them, the next floor up, another girl with short hair passed by the glass, carrying a stack of books.

It looks just like ours, K thought. Down to the details. Yet it was nightmarishly unlike home. As if the Letter Girls had returned after all, having traveled in a circle that changed them.

Changed everything.

“We have to go,” B said again. “We just…right now, K.”

K turned quick on her sisters. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me we don’t tell M.O.M. Not yet.”

“What?” B asked.

“What are you talking about, K?” Q asked.

K didn’t know exactly. But what she felt, this overwhelming sense of having woken up to a second dream, wasn’t made up entirely of revulsion and fear.

There was interest there, too. Interest in this second reality. In the distortion of her own.

“I just wanna process this,” K said. “I just wanna think for one second before we run back and tell M.O.M. about something we know nothing about.”

B studied her sister. Her best friend. “You’re scaring me, K.”

“I’m sorry. Just…for me? For now?”

Q pointed to a high window. The girls inched back farther into the shadows of the trees.

A girl sat by her window up there. Elbows on the sill. Looking down into the Yard.

“Now,” B said.

“Hang on,” K said.

“Now.”

Then K felt two hands upon her shoulders as B and Q dragged her back into the pines.

Without speaking, they ran, using the light from the second Turret to guide them.

And when the light ran out, when they’d passed beyond its range, they used the moon, their new knowledge of the pines, ducking branches and sidestepping trees with more ease than they had on the way there. And when they saw the light of their own tower ahead, they understood clearly how much it looked like the light from the other. How similar it was, approaching their own. How the same. As if they’d come from that second tower, seeking to find the meaning of the object upon this one, a mystery K had drawn many times.

They hurried through the light, out onto the Yard, each of them experiencing a sense of nervous-calm for having returned. If they were caught now, they could either tell the Parenthood the truth or simply say they were out in the Yard, bored by the movie, wanted to breathe in the summer night sky. But none of them felt good about it. About any of it. And as they reached the back kitchen door where the staff put out the trash, and slipped back into the darkness of the kitchen, their thoughts remained harpooned to the frightening girls they’d seen in the woods.

The naked backs of the short-haired girls.

The hairy face of the Inspector.

The girl up high in the Turret window, looking out.

Passing through the kitchen, K felt tangled with too many emotions. She couldn’t name them. And while she was glad to have had B and Q with her, to verify what she’d seen in the woods, she also wished, in a way, that they hadn’t gone with her. That she didn’t have to worry about either one telling the Parenthood before she herself came to a conclusion about what it meant.

Stop it, she told herself, moving slow, not wanting to knock a tray of dishes. A cart of pans. You go in there and you tell your M.O.M. this instant!

But the inner voice wasn’t her own. Not entirely. Rather, it sounded like the Letter Girls sounded, all together, when M.O.M. was about to give a speech, when M.O.M. entered the Body Hall, pausing at the pillars to look up and down the pews, smiling proudly at her girls.

The voice in K’s head was her sisters. All of them. At once.

You will tell your M.O.M. this instant!

“Soon,” B said, meaning that the movie was ending soon. They’d made it in time.

The girls were huddled, shoulder to shoulder, by the kitchen doors. K looked through one of the circle windows. Saw the faces of her sisters in the pews, lit up by the much larger faces on the big screen.

Some smiled. Most were awed.

“I’m scared,” B said.

B. The funniest girl K knew. Scared.

Had they really discovered something so terrible? Oh, if what they’d done tonight were to change things, in any way…

“Try not to be,” K said. “If we just think about it for—”

But her voice was drowned out by the sudden cheer of the Letter Girls as the film came to an end.

“Now,” Q said.

The screen went dark in the Body Hall. K, B, and Q moved through the swinging doors. They slid into their pew, Q first, then K, then B, just as they’d been sitting when the movie began.

When the lights came on, M.O.M. was walking toward the podium, a proud smile on her face. The girls cheered and their voices echoed untamed off the high vaulted ceiling. K looked to B. She didn’t want to but she couldn’t not. Farther down the pew they saw Q sitting as she always did, her long brown hair obscuring most of her face again.

“Well, I hope you loved it as much I did,” M.O.M. said. Her voice full of magnanimity. “We’ll discuss it more at tomorrow’s Inspections. But for now…please head back to your rooms. Study. Relax. Or…” She looked directly at K. “Or draw.”

The girls in Voices began singing. The full overhead lights came on. The Letter Girls got up at once, chattering about the movie, quoting lines K, B, and Q would never hear for themselves.

And as they began to file out of the Body Hall, K saw the Letter Girls and the tower and all of her life flowing from the lips of one faucet into the open mouth of a drain. As if she’d turned something on she wouldn’t be able to turn off. And where would it go from here? Where did the water collect? Where might K find her old life again, the one where she laughed with her sisters on Film Night and did not think about replica towers in the woods, where hairy women did not walk the halls like horrors from a Judith Nancy fantasy?

“Upstairs,” B said.

K looked her best friend in the eye. She saw some vestige of humor there. As if, for one moment, they could laugh about it.

But neither did.

Already, K thought, the bond between them felt different. And as they joined the outgoing flow of Letter Girls into the first-floor hall, K knew things would never be the same with B again. How could they be? After what they’d seen?

How could they?

Yet, as B followed close behind her, and as Q slumped her way out the doors ahead, K also knew she’d be going back. With or without B. With or without telling M.O.M. what they’d found.

She’d be going back to that Turret in the woods. Until she was satisfied that she knew where it had come from, who those girls were, and why she hadn’t known about them before.

Marilyn

The loft was a nice one, overlooking the river. The constant development on the Water Walk was the only drawback to an otherwise gorgeous view of lapping waves and boats…so many boats passing below, day and night, until Marilyn began to invent her own games by the clockwork horns blown below, truth and dare until it became only truth, her soul bared clean and unblemished by the passing of the boats.

She lived alone and she believed she liked it that way. Yet nagging thoughts of her close friends persisted: Most, if not all, had sunk below the surface of relationship mud. Most, if not all, were married. And while Marilyn made the rounds, visiting the closest of these friends as their schedules permitted, even holidays and birthdays were now hard to come by.

Why?

Why did it seem that everyone around her changed so much when paired with another? Take Evelyn, for example. Mean, strong Evelyn Tule. The woman was unrecognizable in her current state: near-housewife to the ridiculous Adam Horn. One day a lioness, the next all giggles and bad television. Is this what she wanted? Is that what she meant when she’d say, I’m no settler? What was worse, to Marilyn, was that she didn’t think she’d ever seen Evelyn Tule quite so…happy. As if the bliss of her marital status had cleaned her troubled consciousness of the cobwebs where the deeper thinking got stuck.

It didn’t add up and Marilyn didn’t like it. She didn’t like the way Tracy Paul quit writing. How Mary Tudor-Johns moved across the country. How Anne Horowitz smiled awkwardly at the slightest hint of something she might deem single-life. Like a drink, for example. Like staying out an hour later than usual, for example. Like a one-night stand.

It was enough to drive Marilyn mad.

But she had a plan.

A gathering, if her former close friends could stomach calling it that, in which each of them might be reminded how good the good days were before men. A simple, no-frills party in Marilyn’s loft overlooking the Water Walk. Hell, they might even take the walk themselves, drinks in hand, tucked in the same brown paper bags winos used all over the city. Yes, Marilyn was looking for, planning for, hoping for, something a little more exciting than a Tupperware party of hysterical former friends. Tonight she wanted to show them the people they once were, the nights they were missing, planting seeds of once-familiar liberation into their dizzyingly predictable current states of adulthood.

Anne was the first to arrive. All makeup and ponytail, skirt and heels. Aren’t we partying? she asked, squinting as she smiled, revealing how long it had been since she used the word. Marilyn told her yes, indeed they were partying, and took note of Anne’s glance as it began at Marilyn’s own flat shoes before taking the elevator up her pantsuit to her wild, big black hair. Marilyn had no illusions. She knew she looked the part of the crazed feminist, a woman with no man. But she liked the minute concern she saw in her old friend’s eyes.

You look…like Marilyn, Marilyn.

It was the best Anne could be expected to come up with and Marilyn simply nodded, having decided hours ago not to allow a single small-talk smile to grace her own face. Not tonight. Tonight was about strength, about reinvigorating a boring, once-vibrant clan.

Mary and Tracy arrived together, which registered in Marilyn’s gut as a logical extension of being lost-in-marriage: Wives usually went out with wives. It wasn’t enough that the men dominated four-fifths of their lives; that last sliver couldn’t be faced alone, no no, had to be met hand in hand with a fellow sufferer.

Marilyn! Tracy said, making to kiss both Marilyn’s cheeks, a gesture Marilyn didn’t see coming. It went awkwardly, but Marilyn did not feel embarrassed. She’d decided, too, hours ago, not to permit herself a single flushed face tonight; the idea was to inspire, not to spread a mood of loathsome inadequacy. Mary assisted in this way, by being as cheerful as ever and even asking jokingly, What’s to drink?

Marilyn told her she was glad she asked, that Evelyn could let herself in (a purposeful statement, to be sure: THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS EVELYN MIGHT DO ON HER OWN), and that she hoped the girls were ready for a night on the town, even if that town was Marilyn’s own loft.

Things started well. Very well. And Evelyn did let herself in. And the five formerly close friends sat on Marilyn’s couches and talked about old times and drank a little too much and swore and joked and complained. It was the last bit that led to talk about their home lives, married life, and how distant the past seemed to them now. Marilyn, who had strategically skirted any talk of the past, tried, in vain, to direct the conversation back to the present, reminding the women that they were still young, it had only been five years after all, that any life they wanted still waited for them, that anything could be achieved if the right amount of energy was put into it. These loftier statements, made three drinks deep, didn’t do much to stem the tide of domestic topics, and eventually Marilyn found herself feeling downright bad. Here her oldest friends had convened at her behest, here she’d gone out of her way to direct the flow of conversation, here she’d set out to re-liberate these women-turned-girls, and before eight o’clock she’d completely lost them. For Christ’s sake, the things Anne and Mary were talking about sounded like the program for a children’s show. The way Tracy apologized for ripping Jeff had Stockholm syndrome written all over it. And Evelyn!

Marilyn had to get up. Had to leave the room, take a deep breath, recalibrate, and enter the living room all over again. She had to remind herself of her goal this evening and how far she was from achieving it. What they needed, she knew, was to get out of the fucking loft. They needed to take the Water Walk to the casino, a restaurant, even a dance club. Anything to remind these ladies what independence once felt like.

Standing before the bathroom mirror, eyeing herself in her white pantsuit and wild hair, she had no doubt the eyes her glasses magnified were obvious in their anger. How to drop that? Drunk people could smell anger. Went out of their way to either avoid it or confront it head-on. Marilyn didn’t want either to happen. The women were laughing in the living room. This was good. But what were they laughing at? Because there was a big difference between finding it funny how the dishwasher always seemed to break at just the wrong time and rediscovering one’s self-worth.

A walk, she told herself. Just get the girls out of the loft.

Decided, she returned to find a fresh drink for herself on the table. Happy homemaker Mary had made it. Marilyn said thank you and made no attempt to gauge the conversation, where they were at, how deep they were into it, whether or not it was a topic of merit or not. Rather, she split it in two.

You guys wanna go out for a bit?

Oh, the way they reacted, oh, the way they looked at her, then each other, then their watches, the windows, the floor. Could they go out for a bit? Could they? Was it in the ledger of things they could see themselves doing these days? Going out? Or was it so entirely outrageous that Marilyn may as well have suggested they eat the plants?

Noises by the front door then. A huskier voice. Marilyn, still standing, looked from the door to Evelyn, just as Evelyn’s face broke into a smile.

Adam’s here! Evelyn said, rising to answer a door that had not yet been knocked on.

Marilyn looked to the others just as they looked away.

In that moment, she knew. She knew the night was a bust. Knew that her friends were aware of how she felt and what she was trying to do by inviting them out. She hadn’t stood a chance from the start. A waste is what it was. Evelyn opened the front door and a murder of drunk men stumbled into the loft.

Trying her best to accept what had happened, that a silly effort to rekindle the independence lost to her old friends had gone belly-up, Marilyn lifted the drink Mary made as Adam and Jim, Tony and Nate, barked ridiculous jokes, knocked a picture off the wall, and barreled into the living room. Each moved to his respective wife, wobbly waters parting, revealing, with them, a fifth man, alone, unclaimed, still walking toward Marilyn herself.

Who was he?

I hate this shit, he said, reaching out a hand to shake hers. She took it. Every time we go out we end up back in.

Marilyn, still not over the surprise of the men showing up, still not over having lost what little grip she had on the night, raised her drink.

You want a sip…?

Her few words climbed up into an unfinished question.

Richard, the man said. And you have no idea how much I do.

B Scared

Staring out her living room window, sitting upon the ledge, K thought of the girl she’d seen doing the same up high in the Turret in the woods. She tried not to look in the direction of the spire of that tower but found herself doing it anyway. After all, who would notice? B and Q hadn’t told M.O.M. about their journey in the morning’s Inspections. And K certainly hadn’t, either. And with that, the three had done something, indeed: intentionally withheld information from the Parenthood for the first time in their lives.

But that wasn’t exactly true. There were instances of what Judith Nancy called “white lies” (Nancy had even titled one of her thrilling books White Lies) and there wasn’t a Letter Girl in the tower who hadn’t blamed something she did on someone else, hadn’t said she was studying when she wasn’t. This, K was partly able to fool herself into believing, was precedent, proof, that lying wasn’t the end-all, wasn’t evil, and certainly wasn’t reason to be sent to the Corner. Never mind that pretending to read the mathematics textbook was nothing like finding strange (horribly strange!) girls in a second tower in the woods; K needed to believe it was okay to do what she’d done.

Drawing what she’d seen was, for her, a kind of therapy, despite knowing that a paper trail could be dangerous.

And B, watching these drawings come to life, as the Boats board lay inert and unplugged between them on the carpet, grew increasingly obsessed with the punitive room in the basement: the Corner; the longtime boogeywoman of the Letter Girls.

“I don’t want to be sent away,” B said.

“Sent away to where?”

As is often the way with best friends and sisters, they didn’t need to voice the conclusion they’d both suddenly arrived at. But B still did it.

“Is the second tower the Corner?”

K nodded. “Maybe.”

“Does that mean…does that mean J is over there?”

“Maybe.”

The idea that the second Turret was the place they’d long feared, that it was there that girls were sent when they were spoiled rotten…

“That might explain the hair on the face,” B said. “Rotts. Placasores. Oh, K…we saw the Corner!”

“Wait. Hang on. We might have seen the Corner. But that doesn’t explain how there were so many girls over there.”

“So many girls.”

They thought about this new theory. They talked about it. They poked holes in it. But both kept returning to it, in its simple, original conceit: The second tower is the Corner.

Despite articulating no good explanation for the other girls, despite having no idea how a girl might get from a room in the basement of this tower to an eighth-floor window in the other one, the theory simply made too much sense to be wrong. And they needed to be right about something.

“We should ask M.O.M.,” B said. The stressed smile on her face revealed more than just the pride of having solved a difficult riddle. K saw relief there. It was killing B, she knew, not to tell M.O.M. what they’d found.

“I don’t think so,” K said.

B tried to maintain her levity, but it was not easy. “I don’t get you, K. We skip out on Film Night, hoping to find a stick in the dirt. Instead, we find…that…and you want to keep it all to yourself! Why?”

“Well, now I wanna know if J is there.”

“There’s one very easy way to find out.”

“Is there?”

B looked hurt. Not like K had offended her personally but rather had offended every detail of the world B lived in, the world B felt comfortable living in. “What are you saying, K? What exactly are you saying? Because, at first, I was under the impression that you just wanted to think about what we found. Isn’t that what you said we should do? And here we’ve figured it out, that place has to be the Corner, but you still want to hide it from M.O.M. Why? Because you suddenly don’t…trust her? And why not? Because she expressed interest in your drawings?” B looked to the new drawings, the ones of a potbellied Inspector with hair on her face walking the glass hall of the second tower. “I think you’re taking this all way too personally, K. That’s what I think. You don’t like that the Parenthood is interested in your drawings for any reason other than they are good. That’s it, isn’t it? You want accolades, not questions. You want a pat on the back without anybody saying, Hey hey, what’s this in your drawing? Do I know you anymore?”

B got up. So did K.

“Wait a minute,” K said. She reached out for B’s arm, but B pulled it back. “Hey! Aren’t you interested in finding out if J is over there? Aren’t you interested in why she was sent in the first place?”

“Of course,” B said. Then, “No. You know what? No. I’m sorry, K. But this is a matter for M.O.M., and every minute we hide it from her is another minute of us falling deeper into this craziness! Think about it, K. Do you want to be sent over there? Do you want to live in that second tower with all those…those…terrible girls?”

K looked to the window, to give herself a second. If she stared too long into B’s eyes she’d either cave or say something she’d regret.

She thought fast. Because she had to. It had never been something she prided herself on, thinking fast, being more quick-witted than her sisters, but now she simply had to be. And as the words came pouring, smooth, out of her mouth, she began to question her own motives, for when had she ever sounded so…convincing? And was this sudden ability to convince B born of genuine concern for what was out there (and why the Letter Girls had never been told about it) or was it simply a matter of wanting to be right?

“B, I’m thinking this way to protect M.O.M. Truly. You’ve seen how much work she’s doing lately…do you think she needs to be burdened by our silly trip into the pines? And besides, what exactly happened out there? How was your Inspection this morning? Did they say you have Rotts? Did they say you have Vees?”

“No. I was declared clean.”

“Of course you were. So, there you have it. We did this terrible thing, right? We skipped out on Film Night. We went out on our own and we saw a second tower. But we both passed our Inspections today, too. I don’t see any reason in the world to drop this on M.O.M.’s lap. The poor woman has enough going on as it is.”

B’s eyes grew distant and K knew she had her. For now anyway. Whatever she’d said, it was working. And with B, once a thing started working, in the end it worked.

“Fine,” B said.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Okay. Fine, K. I get it.” She looked to the window. “Kind of.”

K took her arm, and this time B let her. K led her to the window. “Come here,” she said.

“What?”

“I wanna show you something.”

“What?”

At the glass, K pointed. “You see that Yard? You see those pines? All still here. So is the room we’re standing in. And so is your body and your mind. We didn’t break anything, B. We didn’t ruin something. And we were both declared clean today. We’re not spoiled rotten.”

B smiled. “You’re right.” She looked down at the Yard. “It was fun, wasn’t it? I mean…it was completely…crazy.”

B laughed, and it sounded so good to K. K said, “We’ll figure out more about it. But until we absolutely have to, I don’t see any reason to bother M.O.M. Like the Judith Nancy books: Some adventures should be for the young girls alone.”

B looked her friend, her sister, in the eye. A last beat, an unspoken agreement. For now. Then she made for the door. Halfway, she said, “How, K?”

“How what?”

“How are we going to find out more about it?”

K silently chided herself for having said it the way she did. “The same way we find out more about everything…by using our limitless minds!”

K laughed at her own imitation of Professor Hjortsberg’s sluggish speech.

“Okay, K. See you later tonight.”

“Okay.”

B left. K turned to the glass again.

Staring into the pines, she saw herself there, not using her mind at all but rather her hands, her feet, and her eyes.

Going Back

Moonlight again. The pines again. But this time K was alone.

Fleeing the Turret was simple. The Letter Girls hardly ever left their floors after sundown, and K, having mastered the art of taking the stairs quietly (including, of course, the opening and closing of the stairwell doors), relied on her routine as she arrived first at the ground floor, then waited for Inspector Rivers to make her rounds—not once, not twice, but three times—before slipping out of the stairwell, hurrying to the Body Hall, and stealing out through the kitchen again. The Turret floodlights illuminated all of the Yard but K took the shortest distance across, from the back door to the pines bordering the Orchard entrance, just as she had done with B and Q. Wearing her black slacks and turtleneck, she sank easily into the shadows and marveled at her own opacity; her hands seemed to be free-floating in the darkness. Safe at the border of pines, she turned to study the tower in full. Once she was satisfied nobody had seen her, not even a sister, she waited another minute more. Then, using her compass, she headed out for the second tower.

She thought about J on the way.

It’d never been hard to recognize the stronger attributes of her sisters. Indeed, the Parenthood stressed looking for such things. And while all the girls were intelligent, J was bright in a different way; she was what M.O.M. called optimistic. When the other Letter Girls (K included) fretted over their exams, J used to say, I know as much as I know until I know more.

“I know as much as I know until I know more,” K said now, trekking through the pines, alone. The compass declared her direction true, and her watch let her know she was already halfway there.

Would someone find her missing back home? Inspector Rivers, perhaps, checking the bedrooms? And if so, would B tell her where K probably was?

K couldn’t worry about that now. She’d reached the lights of the second tower (the Corner?) and she could see the tips of her black boots on the forest floor. She stepped fully into the new light and used the trees to hide, one by one. The memories of what she’d seen last time out were impossible to ignore: the naked backs, the short hair, the plodding Inspector.

At the edge of the pines, the second Yard stretching so far in front of her until it reached the sidewalks and the brick base of the second Turret, K crouched. She watched. And she heard a sound behind her.

“Oh!” she said, turning quick, expecting to see B, perhaps, or Q.

Or maybe the lumbering Inspector.

She didn’t want to use her voice, didn’t want to talk at all so close to this tower. But she spoke all the same.

“Is someone there?”

Yes, her eyes told her. Someone only half-hidden by a tree.

K wasted no time. Rather than remain frozen-still like her mind told her to do, K bolted toward the very tree that hid someone. She gripped the bark and spun around it, then around it again, then once more, before being convinced that nobody was there.

Yet…

“Yet…you’re scared silly,” she said. She scanned the woods as best she could. The considerable light from the tower helped. She listened.

When she faced the tower again, she saw figures through the glass of the first-floor hall. Three short-haired girls, taller, it seemed, than the Letter Girls back home. K had to consciously stop herself from stepping out from the pines, crossing the Yard, pressing her face to the glass. Knocking.

Seeing life in this tower for the second time was no less astonishing than it had been the first.

She wished she had the means by which to view them closer. A magnifying glass like the ones used by the Inspectors every morning of her life.

The girls in the hall laughed. It was the sort of communal laughter that, no matter how K or B might spin it, indicated legitimate happiness. The Letter Girls learned about happiness in Professor Hjortsberg’s class. Learned about innocence and sorrow, too. What K was seeing, the large smiles, the cocked-back heads, the hands to their chests: It was all incompatible with the idea of the place being the Corner. Surely girls sent to the Corner didn’t enjoy being there…

…right?

“It’s not the Corner,” she told herself. But she wasn’t sure. Not yet.

From a window above, K heard a voice cry out a single name, a single letter, that broke her heart.

“J!”

J. The very name she sought. Proof that the lost Letter Girl was here after all.

K stepped out of the pines, onto the grass of the enormous Yard.

She wanted to be, had to be, closer to the window on the eighth floor, where she’d heard the name shouted, where she now saw four girls by the window. Two of them had their backs to the frame; the other two faced them. K didn’t recognize J at all. None of these girls had J’s blond hair, her lithe build, her way of standing, of sitting, of moving.

None of them had the face that K once drew.

If that was J up there (and it had to be, it had to be!), what had this place done to her that she’d changed so much?

K stepped back into the cover of the pines. The first floor looked vacant now. No girls. No Inspector. Nobody.

Up in the window, the girls talked. And their voices carried.

“It was his idea!” one said. One with glasses.

His. K guessed His was a name.

“It was not!” said another. This one with short curly hair.

“He didn’t mean it that way,” another said.

He. Another name?

“Oh, he most certainly did.” The one with glasses. “J always means what he says.”

Too many words for K to process. She had to get closer. She wanted to see them up close. Wanted to hear them up close. Wanted to be able to draw them, wanted to be able to—

An alarm sounded. A sound so familiar to K that, at first, she mistook it to mean she was home.

It was the bedtime bell. The gentle sound of a wooden horn, blown by the night Inspector on duty. K looked to the first-floor hall. Saw nobody. Looked up. Saw the girls stepping away from the window. One of them (the one they called J? J always means what he says) closed the window and waved to the others.

Bedtime.

Just like at home.

K looked into the pines. Had the same bell sounded back home?

“It’s not the Corner,” she repeated, eyeing the tower again, still trying to process the words, the names, the gibberish she’d overheard.

One by one, lights went off in the mysterious tower. And just like at home, girls shouted good night to one another through the walls of their bedrooms, through the floors and ceilings, too.

But what voices they had. The girls in this tower spoke in a different register.

“Good night, Q!”

“Good night, L!”

“Good night, D!”

“Good night, J!”

Good night, J.

His.

He.

When the last light in the tower went out, K thought of the same happening back home.

K checked her watch. She looked once more to the dark windows going up and down the Turret.

Then she ran home. Through the pines, carrying so much new information, so many confusing words and images.

And feelings, too. Yes. K was experiencing so much at once that she couldn’t be sure if she was excited, scared, or if she’d somehow discovered new emotions out there in the pines.

But she remembered how to run. Run home. Yet, the closer she got, the less like home it felt. For if there was a place just like your own, only three miles out in the woods, a place with the same windows and walls, the same Yard and pines, the same bedtime bell…who was to say what home was anymore?

Live Like You’re in a Judith Nancy Book

At the next morning’s Inspection, Krantz and Rivers spent a lot of time examining a scratch on K’s neck. M.O.M. asked where she’d gotten it. K said she didn’t know. Which, in its way, was true. K might’ve known it was from a branch, but which?

She was declared clean, but nothing about the day following was ordinary, and K understood that it was possible no day would ever be again.

She didn’t mind it. She had an objective now. A puzzle. A legitimate problem to solve.

First, eyes and ears. K needed better of both if she was going to observe the second tower from so far away.

“You’re talking about super glasses,” Q said. “And I know what you want them for.”

“Super glasses,” K echoed. They stood in the Hall of Classes before the day’s lessons had begun.

“I’ve actually considered this before,” Q said. She raised and lowered her own glasses, as if to prove to K that she had indeed thought of this before. “You think I don’t want to be able to see better?”

“Shh,” K said. Then she wished she hadn’t shushed her. It could make Q nervous.

Why so much secrecy, K?

“Numerous lenses,” Q whispered. “Obviously.”

“Girls?” Professor Hatch was peering out the physics door at them. “Now.”

As the tardy Letter Girls hurried into the classroom, Hatch eyed the space they’d just occupied in the hall. As if she might see a trace of what they were talking about.

“MICROPHONES,” Q SAID, later that same week, as K and Q treaded water in the shallow end during Free Swim. B was attempting dives off the high dive, but K saw her watching them talk. “Obviously.”

“But could you do it without the cords?” K asked.

“Probably,” Q said. “But we’d have to think hard on that one.”

“Well, then let’s.”

B LAUNCHED HERSELF from the ten-foot board, split the water nicely. When she came up for air, the other Letter Girls applauded. B looked to K and Q in the shallow end. Saw they hadn’t seen the dive. Saw they were still talking quietly like they had been for a week now.

“IF I HAD to change one thing about myself,” Y said, sitting in the front seat of the far-left row in Professor Hjortsberg’s class, “it would be to become more…heroic.”

“Heroic?” Hjortsberg asked, setting her glasses on the desk by the chalkboard. The Letter Girls liked when she did this, because it meant she was interested in a topic and didn’t plan to read from her books for a minute or two. Y had struck a chord.

“Yes. I often find myself keeping quiet when I would rather speak up.”

“But here you are…speaking up in class.”

The Letter Girls laughed at this. Y said, “Well, I’ve got a new theory.”

“Oh?” Hjortsberg said. “Please…out with it, then.”

Y breathed deep. She looked over her shoulders at her sisters.

“Well, it’s like this,” Y finally said. “I think Judith Nancy is…the best.” The Letter Girls cheered behind her. “And if you line up all fifteen of her books, if you read them back to back, and you really pay attention to the pattern that carries over from one book to the next…”

“Yes?”

“Well, you begin to see that all of Nancy’s characters research a problem until it’s solved. They don’t let pesky bad thoughts and doubts get in the way. If the star of a Nancy book wants to get to the bottom of something…she does it.”

“She does indeed.”

“And so…my new theory is…my mantra…”

“We’re waiting, Y.”

Y practically shouted it. “If you want to get something done, you need to live like you’re in a Judith Nancy book.”

Professor Hjortsberg smiled. The Letter Girls laughed and cheered. All but K, who sank back into her seat, relieved, as if Y had just handed her the answers to all her newfound and borderline unfathomable questions.

Live like you’re in a Judith Nancy book. Right. What other way was there to be? And what would K do if she were in a Judith Nancy book? Where would she start in trying to get more details about a tower she’d discovered that so resembled her own?

She’d start by studying her own.

The thought came so powerful, so loud, that K looked around the room, half-expecting her sisters to be staring in confusion. But Professor Hjortsberg was already debating the merits of Judith Nancy characters and how fiction is not the same thing as real life. The Letter Girls all had their hands up with something to say. K raised hers, just so she would fit in, just so Hjortsberg wouldn’t wonder what she was thinking.

Hjortsberg called on her first.

“K? Add something?”

K slowly lowered her arm as the class went silent. She wasn’t exactly sure what to say, but she knew enough of what everyone was excited about to say something. Anything. Yet she was fearful lest the words that came out of her mouth reveal her true thoughts. As if her lips held back the reality of her two sojourns through the pines, the images of the frightening Inspector out there. The growing evidence of the place J may have been sent to.

“I just wanted to say that, um,” she stammered, tried to compose herself. Then, just as she was about to let anything pour forth, anything that might be accepted as a classroom contribution, K realized she wanted to say something real instead. She stood up. “Y is right, of course. We should all live like we’re in a Judith Nancy book. But since we’re not, we need to take stock of what makes a hero in our world. In the Parenthood. The real Parenthood.” Hjortsberg nodded acknowledgment and made to reach for her glasses, as though K was done speaking. But K was not. “And the most heroic thing any of us Letter Girls can do, the absolute most important thing in our lives and what we must devote our lives to…is the defense of one another.” Hjortsberg raised an eyebrow. K’s sisters were silent. “If one of us falls, the rest of us must pick her up. If one of us gets ill, the rest of us must discover a cure for her illness. And if one of us should go missing…” She thought the name J. She heard it as it had been hollered from the eighth-floor window of the Turret in the pines. “The rest of us should never stop trying to find her until she’s found.”

K sat again. The room was very quiet. Her sisters turned to face Professor Hjortsberg, who, glasses already on, said, “Back to the textbooks, girls. The ones that count.”

IT WAS PARENTHOOD law that no Letter Girl was allowed below and, until now, that was good enough for K. There might be Rotts down there. Vees. The diseases the Parenthood Inspected for daily. Besides, as far as being tempted to see the basement, the staff offices, Judith Nancy’s office, the Corner…there simply was no known door.

Jogging the indoor track that made an oval around the Yellow Ball court, it struck K how unbelievable it was that she’d never thought to seek out the basement before. The place had played such a large part in the Letter Girls’ lives. Their favorite books were written down there. The Corner was (allegedly) down there. The good and the bad of the tower seemed to rise up from that subterranean lair, and never, not once, had K thought to see what it looked like.

Why?

“Are you going to go out there again?” B asked, jogging beside her.

The question felt too sudden. Here B asked about going out and K was thinking about going farther in.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

“Well, I don’t think you should.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Isn’t two times enough, K? Come on. I can’t believe you’re turning me into this kind of a girl.”

“What kind?”

They went quiet as they jogged the front straightaway, as they passed Coach Leslie.

“You’re making me say no,” B said. “When I’m the kind of girl who always says yes.”

“Then say yes,” K said.

“You know how I feel. Two times is enough. Now you can talk to M.O.M. about it.”

“Not yet. I wanna check something out first.”

“K?”

“What?”

“You’re acting insane. If I was in charge? I’d send you to the Corner.”

It was partially funny because B said it. But mention of the Corner was never entirely funny.

“It’s interesting you mention that,” K said.

“Oh? Why? You thinking of checking out the Corner next?”

K was silent.

“K? Please tell me you’re not.”

K was silent. For the duration of the jog she was silent.

“WELL, M.O.M. GOES down there all the time,” Q said, the two of them in line for dinner. Both dressed in black, but Q seemed extra-hidden by her hair. K felt exposed. Q had whispered but K spoke even quieter.

“Right. So…how does she do it?”

“How do they all do it?” Q asked back. Then she nodded toward Professor Ullman. Ullman had long been a Letter Girl favorite. With her big worried eyes magnified behind her big worried glasses and the way she stammered through every lecture. Always nervous, always fearful, might Ullman tell them where the door was? Even by…accident?

Once K was seated and eating, Ullman was all she could think about. The meek math teacher ate with three more professors at the table closest to the window. K needed her alone. How? And if she got her…what would she say?

“Exams in two days,” Y said, splitting a dinner roll in two. “Are you all ready?”

“Of course we are,” B said. But she looked to K as though questioning whether her best friend was.

“I’m ready,” V said.

“So am I,” K said. But was she? She didn’t feel ready. In fact, she hadn’t studied nearly enough for what lay ahead. No Letter Girl had ever failed an exam, just like no Letter Girl had ever failed an Inspection.

Could the others tell how unprepared she was?

Across the room, two of the professors seated with Ullman dabbed their lips with napkins, got up from their chairs, and left the cafeteria.

“I can help if you’re behind,” B said. The way she said it, K felt like B had just shouted across the hall, K hasn’t studied, everyone! She’s been too busy THINKING ABOUT A SECOND TOWER!

A table away, Q got up and slouched her way to the two remaining professors still seated by the window. Hjortsberg and Ullman. K watched closely as Q tapped Hjortsberg on the shoulder. At K’s table, B, Y, and V discussed physics and engineering. Exams.

“K?” B asked. “Aren’t you gonna even say thanks?”

K didn’t hear her. Q had gotten Hjortsberg to get up from the table and join her at the dry-erase board, where the daily meals were written in marker. There, Q wrote a quote in black. Hjortsberg immediately explained it to her.

“Know who can help me most of all?” K said, staring at Ullman alone.

“Anyone but me?” B asked.

“Her,” K said. “Excuse me, girls.”

She got up and crossed the cafeteria. Professor Ullman looked especially vulnerable, hunched at her table, nibbling on bread, seen from standing above her.

“Professor Ullman?”

Ullman turned quickly. In her eyes, seen so close, K saw sadness. “Yes? What is it?”

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Ullman’s wiry hair was pulled so far back from her face it appeared to stretch her cheeks and chin with it. The professor looked skeletal, her teeth bared, her eyes darting about the big, noisy room. “Go ahead,” she finally said. “I can’t stop you.”

Not How can I help you, K?

“It’s the textbook, Professor,” K said, adopting a voice that was still new to her. One that was comfortable with lying.

When Ullman frowned, her entire face tightened. “The textbook? What’s wrong with the book?”

K feigned disappointment. “It’s the print. We can hardly read some of the formulas. The print is…too small.”

Ullman eyed the girl suspiciously. One eye got very small as the other, the closer, seemed to grow twice as large. “No girl has ever complained about the book before.”

She’s scared, K thought. And with the thought, a brick came loose in the Turret of her mind.

Did Ullman know of the second tower? Did all the staff?

“Well, it’s not easy,” K said. “And it’s getting harder.”

“Maybe your eyes need checking?”

K laughed. Ullman did, too, then quickly stopped. As if she hadn’t expected to express positivity at all. “But I have no problem with any of the other books! And it’s not so much the letters, the words—it’s the numbers, Professor Ullman. And what is math without…numbers?”

Ullman grunted. “What would you have me do, girl?”

“I’m not sure. What can be done?”

“Are you suggesting we print new books on your behalf?” Her voice seemed to be growing smaller, weaker. Up close and one-on-one, Professor Ullman was what Professor Hjortsberg might’ve called shell-shocked.

K could relate.

“Not on my behalf,” K said. “On everybody’s.” She leaned closer to the teacher. “I’m not the only one who has…said so.”

Ullman fanned a dismissive hand. “I’m sorry. But I’m not taking a perfectly good book to the printer and asking for larger numbers. You’ll simply have to use a magnifying glass.”

K smiled. “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do what?”

“I’ll take it to the printer. Where is it?”

K looked over her shoulder as if she might find books being run off there in the cafeteria.

“Don’t say that,” Ullman snapped. But the fear in her voice didn’t transfer to K. K wanted to know how to get down there.

“Why? Where’s the printer? I can talk to them. You don’t have to do a thing.”

“In the basement,” Ullman said, gripping her shawl with one bony hand and pointing to the cafeteria floor with the other. “And there’s no way a Letter Girl is going down there!”

“Ah,” K said. But she left just enough in the one syllable to suggest she didn’t buy it.

“You’re not even allowed in the staff bathroom, let alone the basement!”

Ullman closed her mouth fast. The staff bathroom?

Why’d she say that?

“You’re one hundred percent right,” K said.

“The answer is simply no,” Ullman persisted. “Do you understand?”

“Yes. I get it.”

“Good. Now, go find a magnifying glass. Or talk to Nurse Simon about a pair of glasses, for heaven’s sake!”

“Heaven’s?” K asked. She’d never heard the word.

Ullman’s anxious anger fell from her face. In its stead was something much more severe. K had read a word that described the teacher’s expression in a Judith Nancy book before.

The word was horror.

“That’s enough,” Ullman said. She got up from her chair. “Now, shoo. Back to studying. Back to work.”

Ullman hurried away just as Hjortsberg returned.

“Hello, K,” Professor Hjortsberg said. “What were you and Miss Ullman discussing?”

But K was still watching the thin, frightened math professor leave the cafeteria.

“K?”

“Oh, sorry, Professor. We were talking about textbooks. The math book specifically. I can’t read the numbers.”

Hjortsberg frowned. “Hmm. I’ve always thought the print could be a bit more legible in most of the textbooks. Good for you for saying so.”

The alarm announcing the end of dinner rang, and the Letter Girls gathered their trash and carried their trays to the cans along the windowed wall. K and Q made eye contact as K dumped her empty milk carton into the plastic bag. In that brief exchange, hardly long enough for two girls to do more than acknowledge each other’s existence, time slowed for K, stretched from one end of the cafeteria to the other, and she saw herself walking the first-floor hall, taking the staff hall to the staff bathroom, entering, walking past stalls, finding at the far end there another door, a darker one, one marked BASEMENT.

She shivered as she imagined opening that basement door, then the Corner door, too, finding a tunnel there…one that led under the pines…all the way to—

Q nodded. She curtsied as if to say, You’re welcome. It looked as though K had communicated something after all, as a dark shadow seemed to come over the cafeteria, as her bones grew cold, as she imagined herself doing all the things she’d been taught not to do.

How far was she willing to go? How far would the discovery in the woods force her to go?

Live like you’re in a Judith Nancy book.

K tried to smile at this idea, tried to smile back to Q. But she couldn’t. And she knew that her inability to express joviality, even feigned, communicated something, too.

The Woman Wore Red, All Red

B didn’t like any of it. Not one bit.

“The staff bathroom?”

Both girls had just completed their morning Inspections. Both declared clean. For K, it was empowering, the way she could go places she wasn’t supposed to, think things the Parenthood would have found abhorrent, even lie, all without repercussion.

There was a power to it. At only eleven years old, she felt all of it.

“You should come with me,” she said, untangling wires on the bookshelf in her living room.

“No way.”

K turned to face her friend, because she knew B very well and the way B said no way sounded close to some way.

“B?” She left the wires alone, stepped to her sister on the couch. “You wanna come?”

B looked to the window. K could see the warring emotions on her face, as if guilt and adventure stood on either cheek, tugging her nose between them.

“I don’t want to. No. But…”

“But what?”

“But I don’t think you should do it alone.”

K wanted to squeal. But what she was planning to do didn’t warrant it.

The Corner was down there, after all. Or so they’d been taught.

“There’s gonna be staff down there,” B said.

“We’ll go at night.”

“What if someone catches us?”

“Then we get caught. We play dumb. We play curious.”

“I’m scared.”

K sat beside her and put her arm around her. “So am I. But I can’t stop thinking about what we found out there and I—”

“I can’t, either. How could I?”

“—and I think it’s our duty to look into it. All of it. For the Letter Girls.”

“You make it sound like the Letter Girls aren’t a part of the Parenthood.”

K removed her arm, got up, went back to the bookshelf. She toyed with the wires, making sure they were connected well. Q had delivered the device earlier the same day. A third ear, she’d called it. You hook it over one of your two existing ears and you can hear the trees grow. She warned K that it could be disorienting, could make her dizzy, could also make her think someone was closer than they were.

And the problem with that is, Q said, delighted by her own invention, what if they’re not as far away as you think?

K tried it on.

“Go ahead and talk,” she told B.

“Hello, my name is B.”

K reached up quick and took the device from her ear. “Ow!” she cried. “That was loud!”

“Can you turn it down?”

K shook her head. “Q hasn’t figured out how to do that. Hey…go out in the hall.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Go stand by the Check-Up room door.”

“Then what?”

“Then talk to me. I wanna see how far this goes.”

K put it back on. She could hear B’s shoes on the carpet. Beyond that, she heard V and Y discussing exams.

“Hello. My name is B.”

K looked around the living room. It sounded like B was standing right next to her. Sounded like B hadn’t left at all.

“Wow.”

“Hello, my big bad name is B.”

K laughed.

“And I think my friend K has lost her mind. Can you help her? Can you help her find it?”

K walked to the couch, sat down.

“My name is B. And now I’m whispering. My friend K is crazy.”

The thud thud thud of B’s shoes in the hall, and K removed the earpiece just before her friend opened the door.

“So?” B asked. “Does it work?”

“Here,” K said. “Try it.”

AT NIGHTFALL, B returned to K’s rooms. The sisters were dressed in their Body Hall best: black slacks, black turtleneck shirts. But this time, black gloves, too.

“You ready?” K whispered.

“Yeah. Don’t ask me that again or I’ll say no.”

They stepped out into the hall.

“Okay,” K whispered. “We can do this.”

“One thing,” B said.

“What?”

“If we discover anything really bad down there…I’m telling you right now I’m going to tell M.O.M., and I think you should do the same. At some point, enough is enough.”

K nodded. “Agreed.”

But as they walked the carpeted hall to the stairs K had taken at least twice a day for most of her life, she wondered how bad it might get.

The door wasn’t past a row of stalls, after all.

It was in one of the stalls.

“This is insane,” B said, the two of them yet to enter the stall. There was no toilet in this one. Only a door.

“What if it’s locked?” B asked.

K held up a hand quick. She’d placed the third ear on one of her own, and B’s voice was deafening. She stepped into the stall, listening for anything beyond the door. Anything at all.

She removed Q’s device and tried the knob. It turned easily. The door opened.

They looked at one another for a few seconds before moving. And in those few seconds they seemed to age. As if the experience, from their first trip through the pines to now, had done something irrevocable to them. Forget the lying and hiding, the clandestine missions at night.

In that moment K and B felt as if they’d grown up. A little bit. A lot. Together.

“Okay,” K said. “To the basement.”

But they both heard it as To the Corner.

TAKING THE STAIRS was as nerve-racking as discovering the second tower. Despite living their entire lives in the Turret, the girls had never been upon these stone steps, never felt the sensation of descending from the first floor. They were different from the stairs above. As though the women who built them had stopped halfway. And below, the basement was lit by loose flickering light.

At the foot of the stairs they paused, looking both ways down long cobblestone corridors where, far off on both sides, paper signs were taped to the walls.

K tugged gently on B’s sleeve and led her to the left. They walked the length of the hall very slow. The weak light reflected in their eyes as they read the first paper sign they came to:

K tugged B’s sleeve again and the sisters walked even slower around the first turn, then down the length of a second hall. A closed door broke the monotony of cobblestones on their right.

“The Corner?” B whispered.

K shone her flashlight on the door.

Typewriter ribbon. Both girls thought of Judith Nancy.

She wrote the books of their lifetime down here?

Now B took K by the sleeve and the two girls advanced, gripping each other’s arms. K thought of the second tower. She thought of J in there. Is this the way she went? Through these halls, then the Corner door, underground, only to emerge with different hair, a different body, a different voice, in a second tower in the pines?

She imagined the overweight Inspector from that second Turret rounding the hall corner ahead. The hair on her face down to her knees.

“Come on,” B said. B suddenly in charge. Hjortsberg had talked about this sort of behavior; she’d called it overcompensating.

When someone is afraid, very scared, they often react by being overly brave.

Whatever it was, K was happy for it.

They continued, taking a second turn, this one to the right, where many doors broke up the cobblestone walls. There were more lanterns in this hall and the doors varied in sizes, and the Letter Girls paused to look. K put on Q’s third ear. She could hear the flames flickering. A bottle opening? Yes, the twisting of a cap. The unmistakable sound of a struck match coming to life. The sound of someone drinking.

K grabbed B’s hand.

The match. Someone lighting the lanterns? Someone to check all the lanterns?

A dark hall is an unsafe hall…

K moved fast, pulling B with her into the shadowed cover of a depressed doorway.

Suddenly the idea of being caught in the basement, with Q’s third ear, felt like a very bad idea, indeed. She worried about B. Worried about Q. Worried about herself.

She was doing this not only for the knowledge but for her sisters.

Was she doing it the right way?

It felt like she was. It felt like they should continue. Like it or not, there were answers down here.

K removed the earpiece.

“You hear anything?” she asked.

“Let’s go back upstairs,” B said. “I think we’ve seen enough.”

“Maybe.”

They stepped out of the doorway, looked down the hall. Saw another paper sign taped to the wall at the far end.

“Let’s read that,” K said. “Then we can head back.”

But the length of hall looked very long to B. “I’ll wait here.”

“What? No. We go together.”

B inhaled deep. “You owe me so much for this, K.”

“I know.”

The two stepped out of the doorway and advanced arm in arm. They passed one, two, four doors, each with a name and an occupation. K thought of the staff bathroom upstairs. A door in a stall. More doors in a dingy dark hall. The Parenthood didn’t shine quite so bright from this angle.

There was a door marked PRINTING. A door marked ACCOUNTING. Some included the names of women they’d seen upstairs. As if the staff of the Parenthood were no more than the trolls from Judith Nancy’s Under Things.

“We’re under things now,” B said.

When they reached the white sign taped to the stone wall, neither understood what it said.

“Who’s Marilyn?” B asked.

But K was thinking only of the word tunnel.

“The second tower,” she said. “If we take that tunnel…we may come up into—”

“Into the tower?”

“We have to at least check the tunnel. We don’t have to take it.”

“No. We don’t.” B pressed a finger against the paper. “Marilyn’s the only one who can use it.”

“We’re not supposed to be down here at all. Why would we suddenly listen to the rules?”

“See? That’s exactly what I was worried about. There’s no end, is there?”

“I think there is.”

K made to move, but B grabbed her arm.

“If you can tell me right now what the end is, what it could be, I’ll keep going.”

“J,” K said. A crack in her voice was audible in its echo. “Come on. We’ve come this far. There are answers down here.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe I don’t want them.”

K eyed the length of hall. The entrance to the tunnel was visible, a dark oval amid the cobblestones.

“You do,” K said. “But if you wanna wait here, that’s all right.”

“I’m too scared to wait here.”

“Then hold on to me. Nobody’s gonna get us. I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“No. I can’t.”

With B clinging, K walked faster, past more doors. They reached the black hole sooner than either wanted to. Above it, just evident in the glow from the flames, the letters, poorly painted, spelled: GLASGOW TUNNEL.

K shone her light into the tunnel. Dirt walls and a dirt floor. No end in immediate sight.

“Turn off your light,” B said.

“Why?”

“Someone might see us coming.”

They both looked to where K’s light faded.

K turned off the light.

They entered the dark of the tunnel with only each other. Through the third ear, K heard their shoes again. She thought of the three miles it took to get to the second tower. Thought of the time that took, too. If this tunnel really went there, they’d be walking in this dark for forty-five minutes. That was too long. Each minute felt too long. What if someone were to come from the other direction? Someone with a flashlight?

Someone in the dark?

Still, the girls advanced. Soon K was leading B faster, the fingertips of one hand sliding along the left wall for guidance.

“K,” B whispered.

K removed the earpiece. “What?”

“I heard something.”

“I didn’t. And I was wearing the third ear.”

“Well, I definitely did.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard footsteps. Something. I don’t know.”

The girls waited. They listened. K raised her flashlight, made to turn it on, but…

Someone else’s light beat her to it.

Ahead.

Someone had turned on lights not far from where the Letter Girls stood.

Neither girl moved, not even to the wall.

In the light they saw a partition, a glass divider, separating this side of the tunnel from the other.

K knew that if B hadn’t heard what she’d heard, if B hadn’t come, K might’ve been all the way to that glass wall by now. She might have been feeling her way along that divider when the lights came on.

And the unfathomable woman on the other side of the glass would have seen her.

The girls gripped hands.

The woman wore all red. Red gloves and a red jacket, red pants and boots. The hair on her face was much darker than that of the Inspector they’d seen in the first-floor hall of the second Turret. So was the hair on her head. Her features were so sharp, so harsh, K couldn’t help but imagine drawing a face so unreal, as if by re-creating it exactly as it was she might rise to a new level of artistry. But whoever this was, K didn’t want to get any closer.

The woman slid open a glass drawer on her side of the transparent divider. She placed a stack of papers inside it.

K and B thought of Judith Nancy’s The Hut, in which a young girl, Miranda, discovers a witch living in the Orchard behind the Turret.

The witch slipped secret notes to the Letter Girls in their sleep. Was this woman slipping secret notes, too? Pages and pages of them?

She was tall. So tall. Wide at the shoulders. K had never seen a woman exude such physical strength before. As if, here in the Glasgow Tunnel, lived a woman strong enough to crush a girl.

Was this what lived in the Corner?

It got out, M.O.M. once said. And it took everything we had to get it back inside again.

The woman grunted, slid the partition drawer closed, scratched the hair on her face, reached for a knob on the wall, and the lights went out.

The Letter Girls didn’t move. Not even as the sound of the woman’s red boots echoed into the dark distance of the tunnel’s other side.

“Those pages,” K said.

“Back,” B said. “Now.”

K turned on the flashlight and, without waiting to debate it with B, rushed to the glass partition. She opened the drawer from her side and took out the pages.

As she hurried back, it struck her that, if someone were to catch them now, the papers would crush any already-thin excuse they had.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

B didn’t argue. They moved fast toward the light at the open end of the tunnel. They stuck to the wall, they held hands, they hurried.

A few feet shy of the entrance, B pulled hard on K’s wrist, stopping her.

“Are we okay?” B asked.

K thought of Rotts. Of Vees. They both did.

“I don’t know.”

Out the entrance, they scurried back the way they’d come. One hall, then another. The hall with many doors.

The girls had taken two steps when one of those doors opened.

B froze. K quickly set the pages on the ground, stood up straight again.

A face peered out of the doorway, turned fully toward them.

It was a woman with large glasses, curly gray hair high upon her head. Smoke rose from a cigarette between her fingers, obscuring the collared off-white blouse she wore. K thought of the match she’d heard struck on the way to the Glasgow Tunnel. Despite seeing her out of context, the girls knew who this woman was.

This was Judith Nancy.

“Well, holy shit,” Nancy said, her voice hoarse and wise. “Holy shit.”

The girls had seen Judith Nancy many times before. She always entered the cafeteria with a smile, her wrinkled hands cutting the air as if made of the same silk as the handkerchiefs around her neck. She’d always looked regal to K. Unapproachable. And like someone who had possibly been crying, but who had come to a hopeful conclusion just prior to stepping out in public.

To K and B, Judith Nancy was exactly what a writer looked like.

The only one they knew of.

“Please don’t tell,” B said. The words blurted out of her mouth like she’d thrown up. K wanted to grab those words before they reached Judith Nancy. They made the moment real, proving that, yes, they’d been caught in the basement, doing something they shouldn’t.

“Tell?” Judith Nancy said. She stepped out full into the hall. She wore a long skirt that almost reached scuffed heels. She had a bottle in her other hand.

B looked at K, K who had gotten her into this, K who started the snooping.

“M.O.M.,” K finally said. “Please don’t tell her.”

Nancy leaned a shoulder against the wall. She lifted the bottle to her lips, took a drink, puckered her face, and lowered it again.

“You two,” she said. “I’m so drunk, come tomorrow morning I’ll question whether or not this happened at all.”

The girls didn’t know what to say. So they said nothing.

“Come in?” Nancy asked, stepping aside, making room at her office door.

“Into your office?” K asked.

Nancy smiled. “And why not? We’ll want to be quiet, of course.” She looked up. “But I think we could all use a good expunging talk.”

Still a Place You’ve Never Seen

“Why tonight?” Nancy asked. Her now-shoeless feet were up on the desk beside what both girls recognized as a typewriter. Beside the old machine was a stack of pages. The ink on top looked fresh. Dark black.

“What do you mean?” B asked. Her voice continued to betray her horror at having been caught, invited in or not. But K knew what Nancy meant.

“I learned that the basement door was in the staff bathroom,” K said. “And we wanted to see it.”

“Ah,” Nancy said. The way she eyed K suggested she believed some of what K said but not all of it. Still, it was enough, it seemed. Or, rather, it seemed she believed the right parts. “That’s the way to be. You have an idea to do something, you do it.”

Judith Nancy took another drink from the bottle. The Letter Girls could smell it from across the desk. The matching chairs they sat in creaked as they leaned forward, together, to read the label.

“It’s called bourbon, girls, and it’s one of life’s many pleasures.”

“Does it taste good?” K asked.

Nancy laughed. “Absolutely not. But aren’t some things more about how they feel than how they taste?” She waved a dismissive hand at the two blank stares that followed. “The answer to that is yes. Always yes. Life must be about the three Ss. Do you know what they are? Can you guess?”

K and B exchanged glances. They were in Judith Nancy’s office. Judith Nancy just asked them a question. How to answer? K tried.

“Study, sacrifice, and…stamina?”

Nancy removed her feet from the desk. Leaned toward them.

“No,” she said. “Jesus. No.” She lit a second cigarette, pointed it at the two Letter Girls. “Sensation. Suspension. Spirit. Sensation because you must savor every meal, every syllable of laughter, every second you smile. Suspension because you must be able to suspend your disbelief in all walks of life. And spirit because…well…your spirit drives the whole car, now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” K said. “It does.”

“If I can teach you girls one thing, if I can reveal one tiny aspect of this life that you might not already know…” K spotted distance in the woman’s eyes. Nancy wanted to say more than she was. She wanted to talk all day. K was struck by an image of the author crawling across the desk, gripping the girls by their wrists, leading them out into the pines. Let me show you something, girls. Let me show you another…tower. “It’s that you must question authority. You must trust your instincts. And you must do the very thing you’re doing right now.”

“What are we doing right now?” B asked.

Nancy laughed. But K heard deep sorrow in it. “You’re questioning everything.”

K felt something like an electric current inside. Leave it to Judith Nancy to articulate what she could not.

“We found a—” B started to say, but K elbowed her. Nancy looked from one girl to the other. Then she looked to the door.

“Whatever it is, don’t tell me,” Nancy said. “The point of bringing you two in here was most decidedly not to unearth what you’ve learned but to play the role of a character you meet along your journey throughout life, and certainly over the course of your sojourn down here to the basement. Think of me as—”

“As Rosalyn from Over and Over,” K said. Her voice betrayed her sudden excitement. She was talking Judith Nancy with Judith Nancy.

“Yes,” Nancy said. She half lit up, half went into shadow. As if her own book was something to be both proud and ashamed of. “Like Rosalyn, indeed. What purpose would you say she served for little Candace P?” Nancy raised her eyebrows, waiting for a response. Then her eyebrows dropped back to the level of her large glasses. “Forget I asked that. I also do not plan to give you a pop quiz. Certainly not on the books I write.”

“We love the books you write,” B said.

Nancy brought a hand to her mouth. Both Letter Girls saw the bottoms of the author’s eyes well up wet. Nancy looked down. It took her several seconds to regain her composure. “I suppose I should thank you,” she said. “And so…K and B, thank you.”

“You know our names?” K asked.

“Of course I know your names. It’s the writer’s job to observe, is it not? And there are only so many of us in this tower to begin with. How hard is it to commit so few to memory?”

K and B exchanged a glance. Was Nancy alluding to the second tower? Other people?

A sound out in the hall and K turned so fast it hurt her neck. When she looked back at Nancy, she saw that the writer looked as frightened as B. Worse: Judith Nancy looked like she’d seen her own death, just like little Candace P in Over and Over.

“If they enter this room,” Nancy whispered, her magnified eyes on the doorknob, “I will lie. I will tell them you entered on your own. That you forced me to speak.”

“What?” B asked.

Another sound in the hall. Nancy held up a hand swiftly.

They waited. All six eyes on the office door, here in the last place in the world Judith Nancy should tell a story.

“A mouse,” Nancy said.

“A mouse?” B asked. “In here? In the Parenthood?”

Nancy took a drink from her bottle. “This is the basement, girls. Where the shadows play.” She paused. “But I suppose they play everywhere in this place.”

“Do they?” K asked.

The writer studied K close. “You,” she said. “You started all this, didn’t you.”

B nodded. “It was her.”

“It was my idea to come down here,” K said. “Yes.”

“But not just that,” Nancy said. “Again, I have no interest in scolding you. My God, even I refuse to sink that low.”

“Your God?” K asked.

Nancy’s face changed abruptly again. She looked to the bottle. “My goodness,” she corrected herself. “Tell me, girls. Do you know what misinformation is?” Then, “Of course you do. I’m writing books for postgrad reading levels.”

“Postgrad?” K asked.

Nancy shook her head. “My, you are sharp, aren’t you?”

“We know what misinformation means,” K said, not wanting to let the thread go.

“It’s when someone tells you something that just isn’t true,” Nancy said anyway. She looked to the door again. “With the intention of you believing it.”

K felt the hair on her arms rise. Was Nancy about to reveal something? Tell a secret?

“Like a lie,” B said.

“Oh, much worse than that,” Nancy said. “A lie might be used to get yourself out of trouble. A lie can make somebody feel good. A lie can even be fun. But misinformation—there’s no fun in that one.”

K thought of the frightening woman in the Glasgow Tunnel. She thought of the papers she’d left outside in the hall. Was the mouse eating them? Was it a mouse?

“You’re doing the right thing,” Nancy said. She leaned back in her chair, slurred certain words. Smoke rose to a vent above her. Her skin looked especially pale, off-white, close to the color of her blouse. She attempted to lift her feet up onto the desk but fell short. She leaned forward suddenly, recovering from the mistake, and sat with her legs apart, her elbows on the arms of the chair. K noticed that most of the liquid in the bottle was gone. When Nancy spoke again, it was with more enthusiasm. But of a dark variety. “You are doing the right thing with your suspicions.”

“We’re inspired by your books,” K said. She did not say, Suspicions? She did not want Nancy to stop talking.

Nancy looked at her and it seemed, to K, that she was looking over her shoulder, then her other shoulder, then vaguely in her eye. “Don’t say that to me,” she said. “Don’t you ever say that again. I have nothing to do with the fact that you’re seeking answers…looking for justice…engaging your…your…”

The girls waited for her to finish what she’d started to say.

“Are you okay, Judith Nancy?” B asked.

Nancy looked quick to B.

“This is why I asked you in,” she said. “This…” She fanned both occupied hands to the greater part of the office. “You’ve never been in a basement like this before. And you’ve never been in an office like this, either. And while it’s not much to look at, I’d like you to look at it all the same.” She paused, giving the Letter Girls a chance to look around. They did. “Because, even if the barren walls elicit no excitement, even if the dank air momentarily suffocates you, even if the space itself feels something like a casket built too small, this is still a place you’ve never seen. And, girls, those places are the most important places to see in all the world.”

“In all the world,” B echoed.

“Now,” Nancy said, “scram.”

“Scram?” K asked.

Nancy nodded. “Let’s be grateful that was only a mouse.”

K and B were slow to rise, but they rose. Nancy was lighting another cigarette as they reached the door. Taking another drink from her bottle.

“Thank you, Judith,” K said. She wanted to say so much more. Ask so much more.

“It’s Vivian,” Nancy said, “Vivian Kleinplotz. But who would read a book written by her?”

K and B smiled awkwardly, not understanding what the author meant.

They left then and shut the door quietly behind them. The typewriter erupted to life beyond the wood.

K went quick to the pile of pages on the hall floor. Still there.

The girls took the same halls back. But how different they looked this time.

“I can’t tell if I feel better or worse,” B said at the foot of the stairs that led to the staff bathroom above.

“About what?”

“About lying.”

“B, I think we can agree there’s more going on here than—”

“I mean, here I was, so worried about lying to M.O.M., the Parenthood, everybody. But did you hear her? Judith Nancy? She said she would lie, too. Told us right to our faces. Said she’d lie to the Parenthood, tell them we forced her to talk.”

K looked up the stairs.

“I guess we’re not the only ones with secrets.”

“No,” B said. “We’re not. And if Judith Nancy would lie…who else would?”

The girls climbed the stone steps. At the top, K put Q’s third ear back in place. She listened.

It felt, to her, like she’d answered B’s question without speaking.

Everybody, she hadn’t said. Everybody would lie.

Over and Over

K returned to the second tower every night for two weeks. By now, thanks to the pages she’d stolen from the Glasgow Tunnel, she knew it was referred to as the boys’ tower. She had no idea what the word boys meant, but she had an idea it had something to do with the variety of women who lived there. Some had hairy faces. All had flat chests. Some were abnormally strong or overweight. All spoke in a different timbre, a tone she’d never heard around her own. She didn’t ask B to come with her, because she didn’t want to force that on her friend. B had flip-flopped many times on whether or not to tell the Parenthood, but it’d been days since she’d said they should, and K wanted to keep it that way.

Q helped with the super glasses, just as she’d helped with the third ear. By way of a series of lenses (some of them upside down), K was able to easily observe the girls in the second tower from under cover of the pines at the edge of the second Yard. She took notes. She made lists.

She drew.

She drew J a lot. And while she no longer thought this J was the same J that had been taken from home, her fascination with this short-haired, flat-chested girl seemed to have no bounds. By the end of the first week of spying, she had ten drawings of J, photographic quality, most of them by the view through Q’s super glasses.

But one or two came from much closer.

As summer became autumn, K had begun sneaking into the second tower.

The similarities between the two Turrets would’ve occupied more of her thinking had not the horror of being inside a place she did not belong occupy so much space. The second tower smelled different. Start there. Smelled…deeper, if such a thing were possible. Smelled darker, too. Not in a moody way…but in a physical assault to the senses. K found herself on high alert the first time she entered the building. Not just because she was justifiably concerned with getting caught, but because the actual smell of the place scared her. It smelled more…violent. As if the women who walked these halls, took these stairs, entered these rooms, were partial to different methods from the Letter Girls back home.

She learned a lot from the pages she’d stolen. Boys wasn’t the only word. Lengthy descriptions of the girls in the second tower always included the gibberish words she’d heard in the second Yard: his and he. More than once the girls were referred to as the Alphabet Boys, and K was intelligent enough to note the similarity between that appellation and the Letter Girls at home.

She’d read many paragraphs depicting each of the inhabitants of the second tower, their likes and dislikes, inclinations and sensitivities, a behavior report of sorts. But something was missing.

Exactly what was a boy?

Until K knew that, they would be girls.

There was no mention of the stolen papers at home. No professor mentioned it in class. M.O.M. did not ask about it in the morning Inspections. The daily Turret Times made no mention at all and certainly didn’t allude to any meeting between K, B, and Judith Nancy.

Judith Nancy. Wow. That conversation played out in K’s head just like the title of one of her favorite Nancy books, Over and Over. Never before had K partaken in a discussion she felt necessary to dissect every letter of. Nancy’s wet eyes, her scratchy voice, her delivery, and her three Ss…

It all inspired K to reread all the Nancy books on her shelf.

Maybe the secrets Nancy didn’t want to tell were hidden in those pages.

B noticed the books. Said she tried reading one, too, but struggled. Couldn’t stop hearing the slurred words. Couldn’t stop thinking that Judith Nancy was a sad person. That’s how she put it. A liar, too.

K’s investigation of the second tower, the odd and still-frightening women and girls, the Alphabet Boys, seemed to be pitted against the clock, the tick-tocking of B’s back-and-forth regarding whether or not to tell M.O.M. all they’d done and seen. Things may have toned down for the time being, but B looked and sounded like a Jill-in-the-Box about ready to explode in a loud and startling way.

K didn’t want to think about B at all. The nightly treks weren’t only an enduring unraveling of her former reality; they were also eating into her sleep. She was running on four, four and a half hours a night, and Inspectors Krantz and Rivers had begun asking her about it.

Bad dreams, K?

No.

Insomnia?

No.

Then why the dark eyes? Why the yawns?

I’m a bad morning girl. Always have been.

Mercifully, this was true. A thing K never dreamed she’d use to her advantage. M.O.M. was curious as well, but, as was her style, she observed silently from across the Check-Up room, her arms folded across her chest, her thin frame in a formfitting white pantsuit, her dark glasses obscuring most of her face.

Did she know? Could she tell K went out at night? Could she tell K observed the second tower through super glasses, that K had read pages delivered through a glass wall in a dark tunnel she wasn’t supposed to be in? Did she know those pages employed gibberish, code language perhaps, when they inexplicably called it the boys’ tower?

Did she know?

Could she tell K had found it easier than expected to cross the Yard over there, to sneak in through the same garbage door she, B, and Q had used on their first journey from this tower? Could she tell K had been inside that tower and had smelled things and heard things and seen things no other Letter Girl had ever imagined? Could she tell K used the stairs in the boys’ tower like she did in her own and that she took those stairs to the eighth floor, where a girl named J still existed, a girl that was not her J but a J all the same? Could M.O.M. tell that K was experiencing feelings she’d never felt before for this second J?

Did M.O.M. sense that K had entered this J’s rooms and silently crossed her quarters until she’d snuck inside her bedroom and stood beside her bed and watched her sleep for many minutes at a time?

Could M.O.M. tell K liked drawing J? Liked the shape of her face? The look in her eye? The look on her face when she slept?

Did she know?

Could she tell?

M.O.M. hadn’t given a sign that she knew a thing, and each Inspection had ended with a clean. K thought long on this in her rooms, long after the morning Inspections had passed. Time she once devoted to studying was now divvied up between Judith Nancy books and heavy thought, as K tried to make sense of the fact that, though she’d lied, and though she’d hidden so much, and though she’d been inside places she should never be, she was passing each and every Inspection like she always had.

What did a Letter Girl need to do to fail one?

Could one be failed?

With each clean conclusion, K smiled at M.O.M. on her way out of the Check-Up room, wondering if the woman had any idea that her Letter Girl could deliver a detailed drawing of the kitchen of the second tower in the pines.

And J’s weren’t the only rooms she’d seen.

The crazed woman K and B saw delivering the papers in the tunnel slept fitfully most nights and, despite the tossing and turning, was easy to draw. The black hair on her face, the strong shoulders, the sense of aggression, all brought K to draw her from farther away, employing the super glasses from across the room as she worked. The woman snored and snorted, whimpered and howled. K drew it all. Even the open mouth that sometimes cried the names A and Z in her sleep.

It was in this woman’s living room that K found a bottle that smelled like the one Judith Nancy drank from. It was in this room, by way of many documents, that K determined that this woman was the M.O.M. of the second tower. And it was in this room that K opened a desk drawer and removed a thing called The Burt Report, dated November 1, 2019. And it was in the pages of that report that K found the thing she’d been missing, the missing link, enough of an explanation for the two things that had eluded her so far:

First, the girls in the second tower were not girls at all. They were boys. And while this seemed a simple deduction, given the name of the second Turret, it still confused K deeply. She understood that she’d been resisting a core reality to the situation she’d been studying.

A different species? She wasn’t sure. Something they called the opposite sex.

The second thing was much more important and when K read it, the sleeping woman sat up in her bed. Shirtless, her short dark hair ruffled, she stared into the darkness of her doorway for a long time. K, flat to the wall behind the desk, did not move. Except her mind moved, processing what she’d just read.

The Parenthood had hidden the Letter Girls from the Alphabet Boys. And vice versa. Intentionally. For purposes K hadn’t quite uncovered…

Listening to the woman (man?), D.A.D., breathe hard following another bad dream, it was the first time K saw her own tower and the second as equals. One as badly treated as the other.

D.A.D. finally lay back in bed and K, still unmoving, held back tears of embarrassment, tears of rage, held back, too, the desire to rush screaming across the room, to attack the lying thing in its sleep.

Did M.O.M. know? Could she tell K had smelled men when Inspector Krantz brought her magnifying glass up to K’s naked body?

As she slipped out of D.A.D.’s room, K was crying. Not for having been scared and not even for the brutal shock of this new information.

K cried because it was sad. What had been done to the girls. To the boys. To fifty-two minds that had no way of knowing better.

The Burt Report’s mention of castration could only mean neutering the boys in the same way Professor Langan tasked the Letter Girls with neutering cells to stop them from multiplying.

Boys and girls.

Multiplying.

Reproduction.

K thought of the naked parts she’d seen through the windows. The parts of her own body, too.

She thought of the Living Trees in the Orchard and how not one Letter Girl had ever seen one in person.

She thought of lies.

As she snuck out the garbage door, as she hurried across the Yard to the miles of pines that separated the boys’ tower from her own, K could not stop crying, believing she understood what had been done to her, to the Letter Girls, to the Alphabet Boys, to them all. And while it was impossible for her to say she understood it, she believed she understood enough.

Halfway home, she again imagined herself rushing across the rooms of the man they called Richard. D.A.D. She saw herself striking him. Stabbing him with a knife from the kitchen. Castrating him like the Burt Report suggested he do to his boys.

She imagined blood on her hands. Blood on her clothes. Blood on her boots.

She did not run through the pines toward home. Rather, she walked slowly, her head in her hands, her hands wet, leaving a trail of tears as obvious as the breadcrumbs in Judith Nancy’s This Way to Home. She imagined breadcrumbs of blood. Blood of the man they called Richard. She thought of the Letter Girls. She thought of the Alphabet Boys.

She thought of the responsibility she now had.

And she thought, too, of the feelings she had for J. Of the way he made her feel. The things he liked. His worries. His laugh. His voice. His eyes.

She paused in the pines, infused suddenly with what could only be called inspiration.

And she wondered, aloud, what kind of cruel people could consider such feelings a distraction.

Marilyn and Richard

It can’t be a prison, Richard said. He’d been adamant about this point from the start. When the conversations changed from flippant talk to serious planning. They’d both been overwhelmed throughout the process. Inspired, too. Oh, so inspired.

Surveillance does not a prison make, Marilyn countered. They’d had this argument before. Had many.

They ate sandwiches in Glasgow’s, a restaurant downtown, a place where they often met at the end of another distracted day. They ate well, tipped well, and were often seated without a wait. Marilyn was particularly refined, and Max Lowe, Glasgow’s young owner, wanted her there as often as possible. This meant he also wanted her seen just as often. Richard and Marilyn were seated at a table for two in the center of the dark dining room. Always.

The acoustics, garbled and dim as the lanterns, allowed them privacy despite center stage.

If we do our job, Richard said, they won’t want to search the woods.

The woods was a vague idea then. Two towers in…the woods.

While I agree, Marilyn said, there may come a day when practicality outweighs philosophy.

The idea is to prove that an undistracted mind will focus on its own. If we force that focus, via cameras and babysitters…what are we proving?

Richard sucked down a third of his sandwich. Drank some scotch.

Nothing. You’re right.

Marilyn’s eyes were partially obscured by her large-framed glasses. The lower half of Richard’s face by his beard. The two had changed much in the fifteen years they’d been married.

Ex-cons, she said. This had all been discussed before.

Yes.

And we buy the babies.

Richard didn’t look over his shoulders. Didn’t look to the greater part of the restaurant. Who would believe it if they heard it?

Yes.

A dozen or so each.

Maybe more.

Why more?

How many chances are we going to have to attempt an experiment like this one?

One.

So maybe more.

Marilyn sipped red wine, leaned back in her chair. The waiter came quickly from the restaurant shadows, a towel over one arm.

Would you two like another round?

The answer to that, Richard said, is always yes.

Alone again, Marilyn said, I’ve found the towers.

Richard perked up. Where?

She made the shape of the state with her hand. Here.

A school? A hospital?

Neither. She pulled her purse from her chair back onto her lap. From it she removed a photograph. She handed it to him across the table.

Richard was expecting an aerial shot, and that’s what he got. Two squares embedded deep in tall pines. The scale told him there wasn’t another building for twenty-six miles north or south, twenty east. Lake Michigan was thirty west.

Forestry, Marilyn said. A failed experiment of its own.

Who owns it, then? The state?

Marilyn nodded.

No, Richard said. We can’t involve the state. Can’t let them know we’re there.

Nobody’s going to question what we’re doing…as we’ll buy it from the people who might question us in the first place.

Marilyn turned and smiled at a couple seated in a booth. Richard recognized the man who smiled back as Senator Evans.

Marilyn.

He thinks we’re looking to buy land for a hunting camp. We’re first in line for the sale.

Richard studied the photo. It’s gorgeous, he said.

It’s perfect.

The waiter brought their drinks. Set them down. Richard reached for his quick. He raised it.

Cheers, he said. To ex-cons and babies.

And to Inspections, Marilyn said.

Inspections? I’m intrigued.

To make sure our little ones haven’t crossed paths.

And if they do?

Marilyn shrugged. Then we do what all parents and teachers do. We ground them. We send them to the corner.

The Corner

A month.

No return.

No pines.

No further information about the boys’ tower. Or her own.

A month.

To think. To consider. To weigh. To grow agitated, to grow nervous. To feel free. To feel trapped. For knowing what she now knew. Some days the tower walls felt thicker. As if the actual space of her rooms was shrinking.

A month.

To playact. To attend class and to study. To endure what she now believed were phony Inspections. Phony because everything the Parenthood did was phony. Lies. Misinformation. Judith Nancy called it that. Remember that? When K and B sat across the author’s desk in her basement office? As the writer sucked on a bottle and sank deeper and deeper into her chair? That wasn’t a fond memory anymore. K was able to retroactively make sense of a lot that Nancy said. Once a broken reality. Rewritten in the right way. The memory of Nancy was as monstrous to K as the bearded man they called D.A.D.

A month.

To swim in the tower pool, to play Boats with her sisters, to avoid extended eye contact with B. No matter what subject they pretended to talk about, both knew what they were really talking about. Always. And the longer they looked one another in the eye, the longer that quasi-buried, that not-so-hidden truth looked back at them both.

A month.

Of being alone. Whether she was physically with her sisters or not, in the Check-Up room or the cafeteria, K was absolutely alone. Q kept to herself. B tried. K tried, too. At moments, it felt like the Parenthood hadn’t changed at all. Inspections in the morning, mealtime to follow, the occasional speech by M.O.M. Class. Study. Winter in the Yard. The Orchard. At times it felt like K could turn her back on the whole thing, everything she’d unearthed. Like she could one day smile for real, talk for real, swim without thinking of what J was doing in his tower and how he needed to know he’d been lied to. So that he could tell the Alphabet Boys. So that everybody knew. So that the Parenthood knew that everybody knew. Sometimes it felt close, the ability to reestablish this false narrative. Sometimes she even stopped thinking of J.

But something nagged. A big something. A place she hadn’t seen yet. The one room she hadn’t entered in either tower.

The Letter Girls had been raised to fear the Corner like no other place in their world.

She wanted to see it.

A month.

To get up the nerve. To plan. To lose the nerve. To find it again. K had read the word deprogramming in a Nancy book in which the main character, Ursula Ochs, told her sister that she needed to deprogram herself out of so much self-loathing. The word, the phrase, had stuck with K.

The Corner. That was the big one. The image K held in her mind, the door itself, seemed to come to her at terrible times. While laughing with her sisters. While waiting in line for breakfast. While bundling up to head out to the Yard. And always as she took the stairs down to the first floor. Every time.

Sometimes K worried that her feet were going to keep going no matter what she told them to do. That she was going to step out onto the first floor and walk directly to that staff bathroom, to that false stall, to the basement below.

A month.

The Effigy Meet came and went. K thought a lot about her inadvertent spotting of the second tower. The day she rode B’s ice slide around the Turret to the snowy Yard below. In that year she’d also gone from unknowing to knowing and she believed the latter could be seen in every mirror she passed. She tried to give her all to the Effigy Meet. To play the part of a Letter Girl doing good. But she just wasn’t doing good.

K wanted to go to the Corner.

Taped to the bottom of her Boats board were drawings, veritable blueprints of both towers and all they had inside. She’d been everywhere, seen it all, taken photos with her memory and mind.

The Corner.

Could she do it?

She felt like she had to do it. Had to know.

A few days following the Effigy Meet, the afternoon following an Inspection in which M.O.M. asked after the poor quality (lacking vision, dear) of her sculpture, K decided the walls of the Parenthood had gotten too thick, too tight. The space she’d enjoyed for so many years wasn’t close to big enough anymore. It had become harder to breathe, juggling her anxiety, her bravery, and her desire to tell her sisters the truth.

They lied to us.

About what?

About everything.

But K understood clearly that before she could reveal to her sisters what the Parenthood had taken lunatic pains to withhold, she had to know what the punishment for knowing the truth might be.

Spoiled. Spoiled rotten.

K had no illusions. If ever a Letter Girl was spoiled rotten, it was her.

The Corner. It had to be. That night. Which meant she had to endure her classes, dinner, study time, Yellow Ball with her sisters, a regular day in the Turret.

All while silently planning what she’d bring with her to the Corner.

The unfathomability of her desiring to go to that room of all rooms was not lost on her at all. Oh, how things had changed.

Was the Corner cold? She’d bring her winter coat. Was it dark? A flashlight. Would she die upon entering the room? Would she turn to ice, turn to ash, turn to stone?

She played poorly in her one game of Yellow Ball. Though she tried. Tried to look as though she was engaged. Hid from her sisters the fact that tonight she was going to the Corner.

Voluntarily.

And when night fell upon the tower, as the cold outside gripped the sculptures in the Yard, as one by one the Letter Girls fell asleep, K sat on the edge of her mattress in the dark of her bedroom, trying hard to resist the fear of that door in the basement. The painted letters rose so high in her mind that she could hardly imagine herself capable of turning the knob, pushing open the wood.

Entering.

She already wore a backpack full of her drawings. Drawings of the Letter Girls, the second tower, everything. Not because she feared the drawings would be found while she was gone, but because if she were to be caught, if she were to be declared unclean, she wanted her life’s work with her.

The backpack straps were comfortable on her shoulders. She hardly felt the light weight of the pages within. But she saw the drawings, her world, as if the pages were all suspended before her eyes.

The Parenthood mapped out. Detailed.

Revealed.

“Okay,” she said. “Remember when B said you can’t be brave unless you’re afraid of the thing you’re facing?” She closed her eyes, breathed deep, opened them again. “Go be brave.”

But by the time she was in the staff bathroom, it was as if she were lucid dreaming, willingly traveling through a nightmare. Her mind told her feet, Yes yes, advance, this is how we, yes yes, go. She knew she had to be aware of the things she always had to be aware of when she snuck out of her room. But this night was different. This night K was piqued to a level she couldn’t have fathomed prior to discovering the second tower in the pines, and even then, even then, she did not experience the depth of fear she felt now, opening the basement door in the false stall and closing it behind her.

She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to take the stairs down to the basement and willingly seek out the Corner. But that’s what her brain told her feet to do. And so they listened, as K’s eyes and ears floated above her body, seemingly disconnected, and mantras were the only thing to glue her sanity to her self.

This is right.

This is righteous.

This has to happen now.

B and Q were sleeping in their rooms high above her. Did either of them dream of the Corner? Did any Letter Girl dream of the rotting wooden door…the purple letters…the letters they’d all believed were written in blood? J’s blood? And if one of her sisters did dream, did they see K walking the cobblestoned hall, her legs like the noodles in the cafeteria soup? Could a dreaming sister see the fear emanating off twelve-year-old K as she rounded one hall, then another, her hands involuntarily reaching behind her as if she were trying to grasp on to the way back?

The lanterns did not flicker. The hum of the boiler did not rise and fall. Nothing moved in the shadows, and no doorknobs turned. No footsteps could be heard, and K wondered if the beating of her heart had done something to her head, had made it so she was incapable of experiencing anything but fear.

Her brain told her feet to move.

So they moved.

They moved again.

And they moved again.

Until K was standing a hall’s length from what must be the door to the Corner.

The purple letters were difficult to read, but she could see enough of them to know this was it. She had arrived.

Walk one hall. Twist one knob. Enter one room.

That’s all she had left to do.

She turned around. Then she turned around again so that she was facing it once more. She half-expected to find it partially open, as if whatever beast waited within had smelled her coming.

But the Corner door was closed. And when K’s brain told her feet to move, this time they did not.

She stayed in place but she did not remain still. Her knees shook, and for this her legs felt useless.

She didn’t have to do this. Not at all. She knew enough about the Parenthood and the second tower. She could turn right around, go back up, tell her sisters everything. She could put on her winter clothes and brave the freezing cold outside, hurry to the boys’ tower, wake up J, wake them all up, gather them together, tell them what she knew, tell them their entire lives were lies. With twenty-five girls and twenty-four boys, surely they could protect themselves, defend themselves, from…from…

K shook her head. Had it come to this? Was she now imagining the Letter Girls waging war with the Parenthood?

She turned and left the hall, flattened her back, and the backpack of drawings, to the stones of a new one. The Corner door was out of sight and K tried to pull herself together. This was too much. All of it. She should plan it out, whatever it was. She should go back to her room and sleep. Tomorrow she could find Q and B and talk to them and really figure out what they thought the next move should be. It was simply too big a task: pulling aside the veil alone, unearthing reality for all her sisters, all those boys in the pines, too.

Too much!

K slipped down the wall until she was sitting, then lying, on the floor. She cried.

And though she had many reasons to cry, she only cried now for how daunting the job really was. Why her? Why was she down in the basement when she should be resting, should be preparing what she’d say to her sisters? Why was she digging deeper when she’d already found so much buried in the dirt?

K cried for what felt like too long a time. Then she got up and, heart hammering, looked back the way she’d come. Wouldn’t be hard. Had to be a lot easier to walk back down that hall, turn, turn, take the stairs, leave, leave. Had to be a lot easier on her mind, her feet, her heart. How long would it take? Minutes. That’s all. Then in bed. Then juggling a manageable amount of anxiety. Not manageable. But still. This. This was blind panic. This was scarlet mad. This was—

K rounded the hall and ran. Ran for the Corner door.

She wanted to scream, to let it out, to shout at the door, to tell it she was going to open it, she was going in.

Instead, her lips pulled back as though taped to her ears, the whites of her eyes bright as the lanterns, K rushed in silence, even her boots making no sound, so little time spent touching the dirt floor.

When she reached the door, she used both hands to stop her forward momentum but slid into it, palms out, hands against the splintered wood, the faintly painted letters, the exact description of the Corner door she and her sisters had grown up with, had been raised to fear.

The word shot through her head from a cannon, lighting up her mind’s sky with terrible colors as the door gave way under the power of her little hands and swung to, inward, the mouth of a sleeping man with a beard opening to release a nightmarish scream as he tossed and turned in his bed.

K stopped herself at the threshold, heard the long groaning creak of the hinges, as the door did not swing back, did not return to smack her in the hands, the face, the spirit. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, and from her pack she removed a flashlight, cutting the darkness down.

K saw something, didn’t know what it was, opened her mouth to scream.

But the face she saw before her was made up entirely of rolls of toilet paper on four shelves against the wall.

She shone the light on the door, on the letters. She read:

Not the Corner. Not the Corner at all.

She grunted a sound she didn’t know she had it in her to make. The sound of defeat and relief sharing space. Confusion, too, and the distant suspicion that she had been fooled. She’d seen the words on the door from down the hall. She’d seen them!

Lies.

Stepping out of the supply closet, K closed the door and turned to face a new hall. She took it. Took another. Took another. The tip of a pen trying to solve a maze. A small marble rolling along the tracks of B’s inventive labyrinth, built for shop class, the fascination of every Letter Girl two springs past.

K kept silent and close to the walls. She traced the mortar between cobblestones with a fingertip, as if touching the solid surface would keep her grounded, keep her from turning to dust, to dirt, to be walked upon by the Parenthood staff come morning.

Then, having passed Judith Nancy’s office and the Glasgow Tunnel, numerous supply closets, the printing press, a room for sewing, and a room of old textbooks, she gave up.

She walked slower now, partly unafraid of getting caught. She was only a girl, after all, curious about the basement of the building she lived in. The underbelly of her world. And anyway, it wasn’t like she’d found the Corner or was inside the Corner or had to explain herself at all to anybody who might find her standing outside—

“The Corner,” she said out loud.

She was pointing at the door that made her say it.

At the end of an otherwise door-less hall, the sight of solid steel had caught her eye. Not because it was unmarked, though it was. And not because she felt something cold emanated from where it stood, though she did. If it was a door, it was the strangest door she’d ever seen, forming a solid right angle where two cobblestoned walls met, creating a tall metal—

“Corner,” she said again.

There was no knob.

K went to it this time without preamble. She put her shoulder against the right side and pushed. Both steel partitions moved; the one she’d pushed went in as the other came out, the corner of a hallway rotating, a revolving door like the one she’d read about in Judith Nancy’s Us Heroes.

K shone her light into the darkness. Concrete. Shelves. A drain.

She entered and the Corner door closed softly behind her.

If she was scared before, as she raced toward the supply closet so many hallways ago, she was positively changed now. Colder inside than out, K studied the concrete room. She heard a distant dripping and shone the light on the drain. Along one wall was a wood bench and along the other were shelves, upon which rested metal objects K had never seen before, never studied, never known.

She picked one up. It was clear which part was the handle, but K couldn’t be sure exactly what it did.

Ahead, an archway, indistinct, with flaking paint framing the passage, seemed to ask her to come on, come in. K set down the metal tool and entered a much larger room, where the walls were bare, the ceiling stone, and the floor, all of it, dirt.

A single marker in the far left corner and a single letter upon that marker caused her to speak, to say, No, to almost drop the flashlight to the floor.

She approached the marker, slow but shaking. She knelt in the dirt and touched the single letter, the name of her lost sister.

J in the Corner. This was the Corner. This was J.

Nothing in the dirt told her how wide the grave was, what space J took up, where exactly she was buried. K shone the light around the room, realizing for the first time how low the ceiling was, how cold the smell.

She cried and her tears landed in the dirt, making mud around the base of the simple wooden marker, no more than the size of a ruler.

Her end. Here. In the Corner.

Why? What had she done? What had she seen? What had the Parenthood discovered? Where had they caught her? In the pines? At the second tower?

Spoiled rotten.

Because she’d been taught to fear Vees her entire life, because she’d been raised to believe in Rotts, K covered her mouth with the neck of her black turtleneck.

But she knew better. She’d read the Burt Report. The papers in D.A.D.’s desk.

There was no Rotts. There was no Vees.

There was only the separation of the girls and the boys. And to learn of each other’s existence was to become spoiled.

Spoiled rotten.

K jammed her fingers, then her full hands, into the dirt. She dug, crying, her mouth forming a rectangle of anger, the face of rage. She pulled the dirt aside, thinking of the scene in Judith Nancy’s Us Heroes when Charlotte had to bury her sister after she’d died of Rotts.

“Die, Judith Nancy,” K said, hardly able to see her own hands through the wet wall of tears.

She dug and she dug until her elbows were level with the floor. She had a vision of Inspector Krantz examining those nails through a magnifying glass.

She didn’t care. She dug. She dug. She spoke gibberish, a train of words that, to her, made all the sense in the world. And the words were the only thing connecting her to her new reality, sanity, keeping her from flying away, from burying herself, too, here by J’s meek marker.

The Parenthood killed J.

M.O.M. ordered a Letter Girl dead.

She thought of the tool on the shelf in the other room and she understood it was a weapon.

K understood a lot. J was not spoiled. None of them were. None of them could be.

She brought her hands up and pounded down into the dirt, striking not a box like Charlotte used in Nancy’s story but a soft layer of clothing over something much harder than clothing. K pulled her hands quick out of the grave. She sat up straight. She shone the flashlight into the hole she’d made.

The hole the Parenthood made.

A once-black shirt? Hard to tell. It felt like one. Felt like the very one she was wearing.

K dug more, single-handed, lighting her way with the other, brushing the dirt away so fast that her fingers were a blur and the face (face) that emerged did so as if in a series of drawings, as if K had drawn J many times this way, over and over, a little less dirt upon her with each page.

She did not shriek when the sunken small head was fully revealed. The near-naked skull wrapped only in sandpaper flesh, the small teeth bared, the eyes but two smears of off-white in the large bone sockets.

K got up. She shone the light upon her dead sister’s face and she thought of how stupid she’d been, how stupid all the Letter Girls had been, to believe anything the Parenthood ever told them.

“I’m sorry, J,” K said. Sorry that she’d uncovered the truth too late.

Not only was the Corner not scary to her then, it was less than suitable: a drab, low-ceilinged, undecorated grave for a girl who didn’t belong here.

For a horrid moment, K wondered if it were possible to carry J out of here, in her backpack, up through the Turret, out to the Yard, to be buried in a place that received sunlight.

In the end, she covered J up again. Then she was out of the dirt room, past the shelf with the weapon she would not look at, and out the Corner door.

She moved fast through the halls, her spirit trembling with the horror she had seen in the dirt.

K ran a hand across her own face, not thinking about what the dirt might reveal upstairs, only needing to touch something alive, living, a breathing Letter Girl who might avenge her sister.

Past the supply closet she’d mistaken for the Corner. Past the entrance to the Glasgow Tunnel. At Judith Nancy’s door she spit. She did not stop as she vomited on the floor, the wall, her shirt. She only nodded, thinking, yes yes, she could do this, yes yes, she could appear to be normal, yes yes, she could hide this from Krantz from Rivers from the Parenthood from M.O.M. for as long as it took to put together a plan.

Couldn’t she?

She reached the door to the stairs much faster than she had planned, and it scared her. Everything was moving too fast. Had she missed something? Had she missed the white vomit on her black shirt, the dirt under her nails, the tears in her eyes, the horror so obviously evident in her mind?

No, she’d accounted for it all and done nothing to remove it.

She opened the door and climbed quickly, pausing in the false stall because she heard voices out in the hall. So many voices. Too many voices. As if she’d spent the night in the basement. As if she’d lost track of all time as she knelt by her sister’s grave, as she dug up the body of a dead Letter Girl.

She shook her head no. No no. It was still night. Not yet morning. She hadn’t missed an Inspection, no no. Couldn’t be.

But the voices, the voices in the hall, all her sisters in the hall, the staff…M.O.M.?

They’re looking for you, she thought. And the last place they expect you to be is here, HERE, in the stall to the basement. Because nobody expects you to be spoiled, K. Nobody would ever think that you, of all girls, could ever be SPOILED ROTTEN.

No Nancy book had ever described madness the way K felt it now. She’d never been taught anything like this from Hjortsberg.

So, trembling, shaking her head, yes, you’re fine, you look fine, nobody will know, nobody will tell the difference, they know you, they love you, nobody suspects, K left the stall and, sick to her stomach, exited the staff bathroom.

The voices were coming from down by the Body Hall.

K followed them, wanting so badly to fit in. Wanting so badly to slip right into the crowd of Letter Girls as if she’d never set out through the pines, as if she’d never questioned the reality that had, for so long, kept her warm.

And she did join her sisters. Wild-eyed and impossibly on edge, she was swallowed by the crowd of them, gathered by the entrance to the Body Hall. Some of the girls were crying, and the staff (in their pajamas, all of them, still night) consoled them. Crazily, K thought they must be crying for J.

V was the first to see her, the first to wipe tears from her eyes as her face contorted from concerned to confused.

“K?” she asked, her voice buried (J’s buried, too) beneath the clamor of the others, chaos in the hall. “Are you okay?”

K nodded and smiled, but her smile did not work and the face she made hurt her. V’s eyebrows came together. She was asking her something, something else, but K was moving past her, having heard the reason for the commotion, having heard enough scattered words to piece the moment together, to understand why everyone was awake, why everyone was so scared and crying.

“B is being sent to the Corner.”

Who said that?

“B might be sent to the Corner. M.O.M. is deciding.”

Who said that? B to the Corner? Everyone was asking why. Why oh why?

“She told M.O.M. she saw something she shouldn’t have in the pines.”

The other words didn’t matter. K heard them all as if she’d drawn each one, one upon the other, until the color on the paper was black.

“Rotts.”

“Vees.”

“Placasores.”

Confessed, confessed, confessed…

“B may be sent to the Corner! We’ll know soon.”

“M.O.M. is deciding.”

“Tomorrow.”

“The next day.”

“Soon.”

K tried to speak, but nothing, no part of her, worked. She only shook, a trembling centerpiece to the circle of Letter Girls in the hall.

Then K made to run for M.O.M.’s office. She needed to speak to the staff. She needed to tell them B did nothing wrong. She needed to do something now.

But a last vestige of rationality, sanity’s fingertips, turned her around.

You’ll be sent, too. Don’t do it alone. You need an army. YOU’LL BE SENT, TOO.

Before she could decide to do it, K was walking through the Body Hall unnoticed, through the kitchen doors and out the garbage door to the Yard. She was not dressed for this. She was not in the right state of mind for this.

But the name J spurred her on. The name J and the second tower, where twenty-four more twelve-year-olds kept in the dark might help, might be able to do something.

Might make an army.

Eye Contact

Rushing through the pines, the backpack tight to her body, K knocked a shoulder against a tree. Then another. She fell once. She fell again. And with each strike, with each fall, she cried out, then reached for the sound of her own agonized voice, as if she might silence it, silence the agony within her.

She thought of B, she tried not to think of B. She moved, she went, she ran.

She had a hard time believing her own thoughts. Couldn’t trust them. Couldn’t believe her life had come to this moment, that all her drawings and studies, her laughter and worries, all the times M.O.M. and the Parenthood had picked her up when she felt scared or sad, all of it had led to her running toward a second tower, hoping for help there, needing it.

K came to a sliding halt at the boys’ Yard’s icy edge. The lights were off in their tower. Twenty-four ice sculptures stood between herself and the back door. Snow fell in fat flakes. Her black clothes were dotted with it. Her face and hands were as red as the gloves and jacket she’d seen on the desk of the man they called D.A.D. J’s room (his new room, third floor now, K knew this) looked particularly dark. As if he’d moved out or been buried in a room in the basement.

Ahead, the big Inspector she’d first seen appeared in the hall. He spent some time looking through the glass, more time than K was used to.

Had they heard about B? Of course they had.

M.O.M. told D.A.D.

It was all so close to being impossible to believe. Yet K had seen enough tonight alone to alter her understanding of the world. Her world. Any world. And while something like madness lurked inside her young mind, she ultimately resisted it. Instinctually she understood that there had to be a way out, a solution to what was happening around her. Perhaps that was the great mistake the Parenthood had made, she thought. Teaching the Letter Girls that there was a solution, a way out of everything.

Even the Parenthood.

The Inspector took two steps, wiped frost from the window, put his nose to it.

A second Inspector appeared at the far end of the hall. He, too, looked through the glass.

K looked to the upper windows. No lights. Did the boys know?

No longer in motion, she got colder. Started to feel like a part of the Effigy Meet herself.

Back on the first floor, neither man made to move. A first-floor window lit up. D.A.D.? Another Inspector?

K imagined the Corner in the basement of this tower. She imagined two rulers stuck in the dirt. One marked A. The other Z.

She suddenly wished she hadn’t come. The boys’ tower was crawling with staff. Her own tower was in chaos at the news of B’s confession. Wouldn’t M.O.M. give an emergency speech? Wouldn’t the staff count the Letter Girls? Wouldn’t they know she was missing back home while she was useless to her sisters all the way over here?

K fell to her knees in the snow. She shook her head no. It was too much. Too loud. Too big.

When she looked up, a third Inspector was crossing the glass hall. All of them so much larger than Krantz back home. All of them with some variety of hair on their faces. All of them staring through the glass. Studying the Yard. On guard.

K sank deeper into the shadows of the pines and eyed the sculptures in the Yard.

A room, a cart beyond it, a statue of D.A.D. himself.

She looked to the hall. Yes, infested with Inspectors. Back to the Yard.

A large book. The name LUXLEY in big blocks of ice. A chair.

K silently cried for the life she’d led before accidentally spotting the spire in the pines. Back when her greatest concern was getting details on paper. Drawing in the Yard. Drawing in her bedroom. Her bedroom, where the walls were covered in portraits of her sisters. Where even J once hung, until M.O.M. asked that she take the drawing down, too sad, she’d said, as if J might grow younger there, as the other Letter Girls grew up around her, as if J was stuck in

(dirt)

ice.

K saw J as she was now. Imagined herself drawing the translucent skin that barely covered the bones of her face. She could easily recall the exact dimensions of the dirt that framed her face and neck, as her body seemed to melt into the ground, like when a candle burned to its finale, the wick jutting out of the wax. She shuddered at the thought of J’s chest. Her feet, her hands, her fingers. With this last thought, she recalled Q’s joke about the spire being one long finger sticking up from a grave in the pines.

K made to fight back tears but in the end didn’t need to. A harsh wind crossed the Yard, and beyond the frozen cart that would no doubt provide cover, the rungs of a ladder were revealed.

One of the Alphabet Boys had built a ladder.

K eyed the glass hall. Three Inspectors still. All staring out.

She thought of the pages in her backpack. The details. The Parenthood revealed.

She broke for the room made of ice, slipped through the small doorway on her belly, crouched inside. She was breathing hard and her bones felt cold. The turtleneck and slacks weren’t close to enough in this weather. Would it kill her?

Across the room was a second small opening. She knelt by it. Looked to the cart.

Crawling to the cart was hard. More space than she’d accounted for. Was she casting a shadow? She paused, out in the open, on her stomach in the frozen Yard. Her shadow was tight to her body. No, they couldn’t see it. But did they sense her? People did that. The Letter Girls did that. K had done it her whole life. The feeling of someone at the door. Turn to the door. There’s B.

K made it to the cart and sat with her back to the big wheel. She stretched her fingers out, moved them, tried to find more feeling in them.

The ladder was off to the side of the cart. How far? The Inspectors would be able to see her if she went for it. Could they see the ladder? She didn’t think so. She looked.

What she saw was enough to freeze her already chilled bones. Six adult men in the glass hall. Three Inspectors. Three in different dress. Clothes she hadn’t seen before. She hid quick behind the cart again. What to do? Go home? Yes, she should go home.

K breathed deep the winter air. She looked again.

They still faced the glass. The Inspectors. The others were talking. One of them wrote things down on a pad. K imagined the warmth of that hall. She imagined the warmth, too, of being buried under so much dirt in a basement.

Above her, jutting from the body of the cart, she saw the fringed end of a blanket. Upon it, more ice.

K rose carefully, sure to keep her head down. So scared. She heard alarms that hadn’t gone off. Saw large men running from the boys’ tower door, men that weren’t there.

In the cart…ice apples. Upon a blanket. Removable.

K reached for the cluster of apples, all stuck together. Would the men see her taking the apples? Could they? They squinted through the glass the way people do when they can’t see the whole picture. Was the cluster of apples part of the whole picture?

Was it?

K’s fingers and palms nearly froze as she slid the apples from the blanket down along the side of the cart beside her. It was big enough. Yes. Tall enough. Yes. And there were spaces to hold on to, places to grip.

Crouching, using the cluster like a shield, holding it in front of her, K inched out from the side of the cart. She waited. The wind howled against the apples and against her body on this side of them, too. She inched another step. Another.

No alarms. No sudden muffled voices. She wouldn’t peek around the ice, wouldn’t look to see if they’d spotted her. Instead, she advanced. Advanced again. Some more.

More.

By the time she reached the ladder, she knew she was out of their range of sight. She couldn’t see them anymore. She wrapped the ends of her black sleeves around her hands and dug her hands under the ladder. She could do it. She could move it.

She moved it.

Lifting the thing above her head, she was easily able to place it against the third-floor window. J’s new quarters.

With images of a sister decayed, another sister in the hands of the Parenthood, K planted a foot on the bottom rung and almost screamed when it snapped in half.

The other rungs didn’t look any stronger, but K had no choice. She lifted her leg high to reach the second one. She pulled herself up onto it.

It held. Good enough. From there she moved fast, up the rungs, past a dark second-floor window (M’s room, she knew), until she reached the height of the ladder, reached the third-floor window.

Through the glass she saw a light come on. A bathroom light? Was J awake?

She knocked on the glass.

She waited.

She knocked on the glass.

J entered the living room, shirtless, pajama pants, messy hair. He looked warm. So warm.

He saw her.

He hid.

The eye contact they made was the first contact K had made with any boy or man in the second tower. The thrill of it briefly superseded the horrors of the moment. The horrors back home. The urgency. Despite the overwhelming fear, K grasped the power of the moment.

Contact.

J still hid in the hall.

She spoke to him. As the harsh wind tore at her face and hands, as even the parts of her body that were covered felt dangerously, threateningly cold, she told J she needed to be let in. She needed his help.

At a grueling pace, J emerged from the hall, ducked back into it, then finally approached the window.

Frozen tears on her face, knowing that numbers were needed, she asked for help. The Letter Girls needed the Alphabet Boys. And the boys needed to know.

What happened was what she thought would happen. What she needed to happen. Rather than running to tell D.A.D. there was something monstrous at his window, rather than pulling the drapes closed, J acted, in the end, in the moment, how K believed he would.

Oh, K knew there had been such a slim margin for error. But didn’t everything exist now in a slim margin? And wasn’t the space between information and misinformation only wide enough to fit one who knew the difference?

J opened the window. J let her in.

Frozen Truth

Snow and icy wind poured into his room, and with it, the thing at his window. First a black boot, then a black pant leg. Whatever it was, it wore clothes.

J thought of the Luxley book It Came from the Land of Snow. How could he not? In the book, a creature rose from the Yard, six arms and six legs. Just stood up as if J had carved it himself. Ran around the snow howling, clawing at the bricks of the Turret. Some of the Alphabet Boys couldn’t finish reading it. Some, like L, had nightmares.

“My hands,” the thing said. And its voice was different than J’s own.

It waved a hand and J understood it was telling him that it couldn’t use it. Too cold. He reached out and touched it. Touched the hand of the thing crawling through his window into his room.

A second pant leg. A black turtleneck. Just like his own.

“Help me shove the ladder,” it said.

J stared at it dumbly. Fixed with fear.

“If the Inspectors on the first floor see the ladder, they’ll know someone came to your window. Help me shove it back down. I can barely move my fingers.”

Its face was red from the wind and cold. Its long hair wet with snow. It carried a backpack.

What was inside it?

“Now!” it said. The voice much higher than his own. Like when he was younger. Before he started questioning the Parenthood.

Side by side with it, J gripped the top of the ladder and they shoved it from his window together. They watched it thud to the white ground below. The thing placed a freezing hand over J’s mouth. They watched the Yard together, eyes wide.

“Okay,” it finally said. “Close the window.”

As J did what it said, he thought again of the words from Warren Bratt’s incredible book. Her. She.

He had no way of knowing what the character’s voice sounded like, the long-haired character on the stool who Robert wanted so badly to confess to.

“Who—” J began. But the thing from outside cut him off.

“My name is K,” it said. “I’m a Letter Girl.”

J made to speak again but couldn’t.

“I’m a girl,” it repeated. “You’re a boy. The Parenthood has been lying to us.”

The Parenthood has been lying to us. Even then, despite all recent events, J felt a rush of anger. Had he ever heard someone say those words before? Had anybody ever said them? Yet here this impossible person was verifying what he’d been suspicious of.

J thought, This is what Warren Bratt was trying to tell you.

“We live in a second tower. Three miles through the pines. There are twenty-five of us. We lost J. Our J. To the Corner. And tonight B confessed that she’d seen your tower. I don’t think she said I was with her. But this isn’t good. I saw inside the Corner. I saw J’s grave.”

“Hey,” J finally said, stepping away from her. “I don’t know why you’re saying all this, but you’re scaring me.”

Tears welled in K’s eyes. Her face scrunched as she tried to stop them from coming.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I get it. But I didn’t know where else to go. M.O.M. might send B to the Corner, too.” Then, “We have to act now. Tomorrow.”

“M.O.M.,” J echoed. He felt like he was going to faint. K stepped to him, placed her cold hands on his shoulders. He wanted to shrink from her, but he didn’t.

“You’re going to feel betrayed, lost, confused,” she said. “Feel it all. I’ve been watching you for a year.”

Now J did step from her. He looked out the window. “You’ve been hiding behind Mister Tree. I saw you!”

K looked out the window.

“Mister Tree?”

J pointed. “That one. Where the Orchard begins!”

K shook her head. “No. I’ve never hidden behind that tree. I mean it. You saw someone there?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “We need to tell the rest of the boys and the rest of the girls what we know.”

“I don’t know what I know!”

K grabbed his arm. “The Parenthood has been lying to us. You must believe this. Now. We don’t have time for me to convince you.”

J understood that, whatever she was, she was not threatening.

“I read those words,” J said. “She and her. In a book.”

Now K looked confused.

“Where? What book?”

“A book by a man named Warren Bratt. The Parenthood took them from us.”

K considered this. “That’s your leisure writer? Warren Bratt?”

“No. Lawrence Luxley. I don’t know who Warren Bratt is. None of us do. But we woke up to a book in our rooms. It described…Are you a woman?”

“No. Yes. Not yet.”

“I still don’t—”

“And you won’t. Neither will I. We learned that in psychology. That it takes a long time for certain things, new things, to sink in. Things that you didn’t think were true but are. But who knows…maybe that was all a lie, too.”

J sat on the couch. He couldn’t stand anymore. K took off her backpack. Set it on the carpet.

“You have to go,” he said. “They’ll send me to the Corner if they find you. They’ll send us both. We’ll get Vees, Placasores, Moldus…”

“Lies,” K said. “We won’t. I’ve been in your rooms many times. I’ve been in many rooms in your tower.”

J got up again. “You’ve been in here before?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not…right!”

“I watched you sleep. I went through your things, all the Alphabet Boys’ things. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I knocked on your window.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I like the way you think. You think like me.”

J tilted his head, stunned momentarily silent. “Me?”

“Yeah. You.”

K went to him, knelt before him on the couch. “We have to tell everyone.”

“Why?”

“If everyone knows…then everyone’s spoiled rotten. They can’t send us all to the Corner…can they?”

J got up. Moved farther away from her. “I don’t want that for me. For any of the Alphabet Boys!”

“You think I do? But what are you going to do…now that you know what you know? Now that you read that book…now that you met me?”

J made to speak, but nothing he thought to say made sense. “Why did they hide us from each other?” he finally asked.

K went to him. “From what I read…it’s because we distract one another.”

“What does that mean?”

“When you should be studying…you’d be thinking of me instead.”

J hadn’t expected this answer. “Is that true?”

“Ever wonder how you came into being?”

“No,” J said. “We come from the Orchard. The Living Trees.”

“Ever seen one? Ever seen a new boy growing on a Living Tree?”

“No.”

K nodded. She didn’t hesitate when she took off her boots. Undid her pants. Took them off.

J could tell she’d planned this. But it was no less shocking for that.

“What are you doing?”

“Look,” K said. “Look.”

J looked. He couldn’t not. And what he saw scared him.

“Did they do this to you?”

“Who?”

“The Parenthood.”

“No. This is what a girl looks like. Yours”—she pointed—“and mine…that’s how we reproduce. No Living Trees, J. No Orchard.” She looked down at his penis. “Can I see that?”

J shook his head no. “You have to go. I can’t…this is…too much.”

But K’s expression didn’t change.

Before he could talk himself out of it, J pulled off his pajama bottoms. He stood quiet, blushing, before her.

“What do I look like to you?” he asked.

K stared. “Like a weird Letter Girl.”

They laughed briefly, insanely, and in that laughter J heard harsh angles.

Suddenly he felt some measure of the responsibility that had come with her through the window.

“Is this how we fail Inspections?” he asked.

“Yes,” K said. “I think they’ve been inspecting us to find out if we’ve met.”

J looked to the window, as if the glass had always separated him from reality.

“Listen,” she said. “It’s bad. It’s so bad. But we have to be strong. And we can do this. We can make sense of this. Think of it as an equation. Haven’t you ever thought something was too complicated for you to solve? And then you solved it?”

“Yes.”

“This is no different. We have to be smart right now. We have to plan.”

“How can you be so…composed?”

“I’m as scared as you are.”

She went to him.

She kissed him.

J felt his lips part, felt her teeth against his. Her tongue against his. It was a blur, a rushed confusion. When K pulled away she was not smiling. She only stared at his mouth. Then his body.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She kissed him again, then pulled away. “I once read a Nancy book where a girl was taken prisoner for ten years. She finally escaped, using lessons we’d seen her master.”

“Luxley had a book like that.”

He saw anger flare in K’s eyes. Color had returned to her cheeks. She moved her fingers freely. J felt his lips with his own hand. Thought of her lips against them.

“The thing is,” she said, “the girl in the story missed out on ten years of being with her sisters. And in those ten years her sisters changed a lot.”

“Sisters,” J repeated.

“And when she came back, when she saw them again, she didn’t relate anymore.”

“Sisters.”

“That’s happened to us, J.”

“But we’re not—”

“Something very important was stolen from us. We’ve been prisoners for twelve years. And you know what’s worse? We didn’t even know there was freedom to miss.”

J thought of Q. He wanted to wake him. Wake them all.

K took his hand. “Whatever they took, J, let’s take it back.”

J brought his mouth to hers. He wanted to taste her again, to smell her so close.

They kissed once more, now with confidence. After, K walked the hall to J’s bedroom.

“Where are you going?”

But J followed. And when he entered his bedroom he saw she was already lying down on his bed.

He felt like his body was bigger than his rooms. Bigger than the Turret.

He lay down beside her.

“You get it,” she said. “You’re not telling me to leave. You’re not calling D.A.D. You get it.” Then, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to go back home now or not. I don’t know what to do.”

“Stay a little longer,” J said. But he thought of her M.O.M. Would she be looking for her?

Would she come looking for her here?

J held her without thinking.

Then K cried for a very long time. J, overwhelmed by her body, her voice, her smell, her, imagined all she’d been through before arriving at his window. The cold. The fear. The knowledge that her friend might be in trouble.

Eventually her tears became broken sobs. Convulsions that shook her body until she fell still again. J cried, too. He trembled as he held her. Then K started speaking in what sounded, at first, like gibberish. Impossible plans.

“We can kill them,” she said. “Every one of them.”

The phrases were too big for J to process. And they came too fast.

There’s more of us than them.

We’re strong. We’re young. They’re old.

We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things. Before they make it harder for us to get to them.

We have to send M.O.M. to the Corner.

We have to send D.A.D. to the Corner.

We have to kill them.

Kill them all.

“K,” he said.

“What?”

“Stop.”

“No, J. This is really happening.”

She fell asleep in his arms. But J wondered how deep it could be.

It struck him then that he wanted to help her. Whatever it was she wanted to do. He wanted to help her.

He had to.

And with the thought came the first vestige of serenity he’d experienced since seeing her at his window.

He got up and went to the window. Below, Inspectors walked between the ice sculptures, checking the Yard for…

…for what?

J looked to the lip of the Orchard. Mister Tree. The place K said she hadn’t been. But if not her…who?

“We can’t both fall asleep,” K said, almost as if she’d talked in her sleep. “We both have to make it to our…Inspections…”

J thought of her tears on him. Thought of them four times larger under the magnifying glasses of Inspectors Collins and Jeffrey.

“We’ll make it,” J said.

But they did both sleep. As J slunk back from the silhouettes of the Inspectors down in the Yard, as they studied what might have been prints, mostly covered by more fallen snow, as they signaled one another, as they brought their glasses to the cart, the room, the ladder.

J and K slept. As their worlds crumbled to dirt around them, as the dirt left marks upon their bodies, their minds, enough dirt to be declared unclean in any world.

They slept.

Together.

And J woke in the moonlight to see her still in his rooms.

K. Standing against the wall. Watching him.

J sat up fast. Was he dreaming? Had to be.

K stepped from the wall, a small stack of papers in her hands. She came to the bed and sat beside him. She didn’t speak. Not yet.

She set the pages between them. J saw they were drawings. He knew they’d come from her backpack. They looked like photos, as if K had taken pictures in and out of both towers. It was the first time J saw the inside of the girls’ Turret. And while it was similar to his own, there were differences.

The Letter Girls, for one.

So many drawings of other girls. Faces and hairstyles J had to remind himself were real. An Inspector without a beard. M.O.M.

With this last one, J felt cold. The large glasses obscured most of the woman’s face. The bones of that face were proud, strong, and her lips looked like they were made to say words like the Corner. Is this what D.A.D. looked like to K? Did he wield the same power? The same mystery? The same fear?

She showed him a picture of himself. It was a perfect portrait, as if the artist, K, knew him better than he did. His features, warm and sincere, emerged from a dark background, the black turtleneck that reached his chin. And despite K’s intent, J was embarrassed to look into his own brainwashed eyes.

She placed a drawing on top of it. A tunnel. A barrier splitting that tunnel in two.

“Meet me here,” she said. “Tomorrow night. After dark. The tunnel will be safer at night. The Turrets could be crawling with staff during the day.” She paused, considering. “And who knows what they’ve gotten B to say.”

But J had never been below before. The thought did more than scare him. It momentarily made him want to turn her in.

“Why the tunnel?”

“I’m going to tell the girls everything. Tomorrow. You’re going to tell the boys.”

“Me?”

“And we’ll meet when the sun goes down. And we’ll plan. And we’ll act on that plan.”

Before he could ask her how he was supposed to tell his brothers, when, and how to get to the tunnel, K produced more drawings that, by way of images, explained the way. The door, J saw, was in the staff bathroom. Stairs then. Halls. Doorways. The Corner?

A paper sign telling him where the tunnel was. Telling him that Richard was the only one allowed to use it.

“That’s your D.A.D.,” she said. “His real name.”

The letters looked impossible to J. Written by someone who made everything up and wanted everyone to believe it, too.

“Even his name,” he said.

J looked to his bedroom door. As if he could see all the Alphabet Boys there, as if he could see himself telling them.

More drawings then, pictures that elaborated on K’s vague plan. J had to turn away from some, couldn’t from others. Faces he had seen for the first time only minutes ago, now distorted with rage, pain, and horror.

J understood. All of it. He would go to his morning’s Inspection. Talk to the boys. Meet K in the tunnel.

Then…

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. He looked to a drawing of a Letter Girl carrying an ax through what looked like the hall outside his rooms. “I just don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter if you can,” K said. “You have to. And also…” She touched his face. “You can.”

Distorted by his own folded reality, kept sane by her presence, J touched her face back. They kissed. They ran their hands through each other’s hair. They cried.

K set the drawings aside, as if by this small ceremony, the plan had been agreed upon, the plan had already begun.

Tomorrow.

K crawled back into bed beside him and the two held one another beneath the blankets. Outside, winter had yet to relent. The world, it seemed, was frozen, all of the world, all of reality, except for the small warm space they made together, slowly, a red circumference expanding, melting away all the ice they’d found themselves in. Twelve years of frozen truth, finally, now emerging.

They kissed. They touched. They wanted to laugh, they knew they should be able to laugh, but neither did. The Turret was silent as K and J took the final hours of night to explore, to love, to heat. And while neither thought it wise to fall asleep, both did, stupefied by the feelings, despite the unfathomable danger that lurked. J did not wake until he heard that familiar word, that Turret rooster’s cry, three syllables cracking from the silver box in the hall outside his rooms.

“INSPECTION.”

He opened his eyes. Looked to his bed, saw K was gone.

In her stead was a note that read: Boats.

He got up quick, even as he heard the doors of his floor mates’ rooms opening and closing, even as he heard the command for the second and final time in the hall.

“INSPECTION!”

He went to his Boats board and touched the unmoving waters. Felt beneath the board and found K’s drawings taped there, in full.

No dream.

Wide awake now.

And, J realized, as he put on his pajamas, as he rushed for his living room door, as he entered the hall and the line outside the Check-Up room door, no time for a shower, either.

But even if he’d washed her from his body, would they find her on his mind?

M.O.M. and D.A.D.

And if they ever revolt? Marilyn asked, eyeing the first of the two towers deep in the northern Michigan woods. If they should ever all be spoiled rotten at once?

Richard shook his head no. You said yourself, if we raise them right…

But Marilyn’s expression didn’t change, and Richard knew this to mean her mind hadn’t, either.

The cabin, she said, nodding beyond the Orchard behind the first tower.

What of it?

A cavalry of cons, if you will.

Richard understood. Revolt was one thing; needing backup to keep that revolution down was another.

Marilyn went on. A stash of armed Inspectors. They might be on call for twenty years. And they might never be needed at all. We’ll pay them double. Who wouldn’t do it?

Oh, someone would do it, Richard said, grabbing the rake and beginning the arduous task of clearing the lawn of what they’d already decided would be the girls’ tower, but I just don’t think it’s necessary.

Fifty-two twenty-year-olds, Richard. Angry as hell. And by then…us, twenty years older. Our staff, too. One day we may be very grateful we secured protection from our own experiment.

Silence between them. Richard raked. Marilyn stepped to the sidewalk, then to the front door of what they hadn’t yet come to call the Turret.

Richard knew what she was doing. Where she was going. The inner office was already equipped well enough for work. Marilyn was going to make some phone calls. Set up some meetings. Late-night interviews with men and women who had reasons, perhaps, for dropping out of society, who might like to hide for two decades or more.

As was her way, always, she’d immediately put into practice what she’d preached.

Marilyn was on the phone.

Offering protection.

Hiring the same.