Inspection

Inspection

The voices in the hall just echoes…J’s thoughts already in the Tunnel…

Isn’t she amazing?

Yes.

Isn’t she?

Yes.

Even now, in line for the Check-Up room, two Inspectors only a metal door away from bringing their magnifying glasses to his tired body, J was soothed by the wonder of the Letter Girl K in his rooms.

Lies, she’d said about Vees, Rotts, Moldus. She’d been in his rooms, all over the Turret. She’d been declared clean for a year while behaving decidedly unclean.

He brought his hand to his chest and lightly touched it…

Just moments ago her body was pressed against yours…her lips touched yours, too…her legs…can you still see her legs?

Yes.

Don’t forget her legs.

Ahead in line, F made a joke.

We lost J, she’d said. Our J. To the Corner.

X laughed at it.

Her eyes are brighter than any of your brothers’. Her hair smells like the Orchard.

F looked at J. Did you get my joke? Didja?

Even if they don’t find any physical sign of her, they’re gonna smell her on you.

The Check-Up room door opened. G walked out, sleepy-eyed.

“Next,” Inspector Collins huffed from the cold, angular shadows of the doorway.

X was next.

Inspection

Her body, her touch, her smell…

X entered. The door closed behind him.

Inspection

(the dogs, J, the dogs)

Can you still see her lips? Tell me. Do you remember her lips? Tell me. Can you describe them?

Wet.

(dogs)

Wet like water?

No.

Tell me.

Wet like sweat.

Tell me.

Don’t forget. Relive her. Relive her. Relive.

(even if the Inspectors don’—)

Tell me.

She smells like the Orchard.

Tell me. Relive.

(even if the Inspectors don’—)

“Hey, J,” F said. “Who said bark to the tree?”

Can you still feel her skin?

Yes.

The feel of it under your fingers?

(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it—)

yes yes yes yes yes

“Come on, J. Who said bark to the tree?”

She came from the planet of snow. She knocked on my window. I let her in. We met, we spoke, we touched.

Tell me. Because I want you to remember every detail.

There’s more of us than them.

Every detail.

We’re strong. We’re young. They’re old.

Tell me.

We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things. Before they make it harder for us to get to them.

Describe her…

We have to send M.O.M. to the Corner.

We have to send D.A.D. to the Corner.

Tell me…

We have to kill them.

Her nose was smaller than mine…her shoulders curved, became her arms, sooner than mine…her chest was soft, soft as her legs…

Kill them all.

(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it on you—)

“A dog,” F said. “Come on, J. Wake up.”

(even if the Inspectors don’t smell it on you, the dogs will)

The Check-Up room door opened. X walked out.

“Next.”

F walked in. The door closed.

J alone in line now. Alone in the hall.

Run?

But no. The drawings. The blueprints. K. The plan.

The tunnel in the basement.

This might be our only chance, she’d whispered at some point in the vague, overwhelming night.

Do you believe in her?

Yes.

Why?

Because she’s truth.

Truth? Look at you. K is dripping from your fingertips. You’re drenched in her…SHE. You feel the muck of her? The Parenthood protects you, J. The Parenthood protects you from the likes of HER. The Parenthood lied to you because her’ll make you sick. Her’ll make you mad. And here you’ve brought her with you to the Check-Up room door.

He heard the word clean through the closed door. Any second now.

Excellent Inspection, J.

(CLEAN!)

Wonderful Inspection, J.

(CLEAN!)

We love you, J.

(CLEAN!)

Wait. What’s that smell, J?

J smelled his wrists. Smelled her on him.

The Check-Up room door opened. F came out. A big-toothed smile across his face.

“Wake up, pal. You’re up.”

Collins stood in the doorway. “Next.”

“Need me to slap you?” F said.

Drawings of a second Turret.

(I’m a girl)

It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for…it’s worth it.

The Parenthood is here to protect you, J.

It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for…it’s worth it.

They’re gonna smell it on you. I can smell it on you right now.

(there are twenty-five of us Letter Girls)

The Parenthood is here to protect you.

From?

From…

From?

From Vees.

No.

Rotts.

No.

Moldus.

LIES!

From K.

(I’m a girl)

The Parenthood is here to protect you.

I’ve changed.

You’re wrong.

I’m scared.

You’ve always been scared.

Have I?

Yes.

I have.

Yes.

There are no Placasores, J.

No.

D.A.D. is your disease.

EXCELLENT INSPECTION, J!

Collins cleared his throat. J stepped into the room. The door closed behind him.

Under the lights he thought he could see her handprints on his. Disrobing, he could see her everywhere.

The two Inspectors looked from his feet to his face.

They know.

“Ready?” he asked. His voice was not his own. Changed.

The Parenthood is here to protect you.

“Begin.” A voice from behind him. Also changed. Different now.

D.A.D.

His name is Richard.

Don’t say his name.

Inspector Collins brought his magnifying glass to J’s chest.

Could he see K with it? She was so big. She was everywhere.

Collins leaned forward, smelled the air around J. The dogs whined behind him.

“D.A.D.?” Collins said.

J felt the tunnel receding. It didn’t matter to him then that what Collins was about to say to D.A.D. might result in his death. He wanted to see K in that tunnel. It’s all he wanted. Ever again.

To see K.

Collins pointed to J’s fingers. J hadn’t even noticed the Inspector examining his hands.

D.A.D., beside him now, lifted J’s left hand to his eyes.

“Charcoal,” he said. Then, without looking J in the eye, as if J were already gone, unclean, removed from the Parenthood, “Been drawing pictures lately, J?”

The mood in the Check-Up room was horribly different from Inspections of old. J noticed it now. And not just because D.A.D. had found charcoal on his fingertips. If the Inspectors were to pull a two-foot worm from J’s ear, he’d say he understood the mood; now the mood made sense. If they peeled the flesh from his face with their fingers, he’d understand the apprehensive look in their eyes as they examined him, head to toe, magnifying glasses in hand.

“Some of the ink in the textbooks runs,” J said.

“Yeah?” D.A.D. asked. His voice different now. J thought maybe it was changed forever. “Which book?”

“Most of them.”

“Which one were you reading last night?”

J tried to think quick, but it wasn’t easy. Exams were coming up. Which exams?

“Math,” he said.

Outright lying. No way to rationalize it. Not now.

D.A.D. did not respond, and in the steel wall J saw a distorted reflection of the Check-Up room at large. Himself made extra thin, D.A.D. and the Inspectors so big.

Collins and Jeffrey exchanged a glance. Did they know J saw them? Did they know he saw the unknown in their eyes?

No boy had ever failed an Inspection.

Would he today?

“Raise your arms, J.”

D.A.D. in the reflection. D.A.D. taking the glass from Collins. D.A.D. wielding the magnifying glass himself.

J had never seen him do that before.

“Arms, J.”

J raised his arms and felt the cold metal rim against his skin. Then his ears, his nostrils, his lips.

D.A.D. paused at his lips.

He sniffed the air so close to J’s face, it felt like he was sucking the air from J’s lungs.

Did the Inspectors know about girls? Had they ever done what J did last night?

Had D.A.D.?

J heard dark wind out in the hall, heavy breathing through the silver square speaker high on the Turret wall.

But no. Just the dogs behind the glass.

The Inspectors moved nervously, their reflection betraying much weaker men than the ones J had believed to be so strong.

Why hadn’t he noticed all this before?

The cold magnifying glass pressed to his penis.

J closed his eyes and saw the drawings taped to the bottom of his Boats board. Drawings of the two Turrets, the halls and the bathroom stalls, the basements, the tunnel.

Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

Yes, J thought. I’ll be there.

The glass came quick to his face again. J didn’t want to open his mouth, but D.A.D. forced the thing against his teeth and his lips parted. The Inspectors moved in closer.

Could they see a kiss in there? Did they know how good it felt? How true?

The Parenthood has been lying to us.

Oh yes, indeed.

A puppy will turn on its master, D.A.D. once said, once it thinks it knows what’s best. But the master always arrives at what’s best first.

The dogs scratched against the door that kept them in.

The Parenthood protects you.

“Anything you want to tell me?” D.A.D. asked.

J’s mind’s eye saw a figure crouched behind Mister Tree. Saw D reading all of Warren Bratt’s insane book. Saw K at his window, her fingers numb with winter. Saw her drawings of other Letter Girls, patrolling a second Turret’s hallways with rusty tools in their hands. Saw K’s M.O.M. Heard the name Richard.

Anything you want to tell me?

Yet, despite this unfathomable wash of confusion and new information, despite the fact that he trusted K, entirely, and believed the reality-cracking tales she’d told him, there was only one thing in the world he felt he could still hold on to. One buoy in the scarlet-mad waters of this new worldview.

D.A.D.’s ever-caring face.

And how those eyes had watched over J and the other Alphabet Boys all their lives.

Madly, J found he was able to wholly believe what K had told him while trusting the Parenthood in full.

Still.

Tears pooled in a tunnel in the basement of his eyes.

Yes, there was something he wanted to tell, D.A.D. Something he wanted so badly to say.

“I saw a girl out my window.”

The words seemed to crawl out of his mouth, fingers first, a new J emerging into the Check-Up room. A boy he didn’t recognize at all. The beginning of a much bigger story, only a piece of what felt like a huge truth. But he felt great relief for having cracked that truth open for his D.A.D.

“Say that again,” D.A.D. said.

Behind the man, the eyes of the Inspectors seemed to grow too wide for their faces.

J smiled nervously. Surely D.A.D. was already thinking how to protect the boys from another visit from another girl. Right? Surely D.A.D. was employing all his powers of protection, summoning answers from places J would never have to fathom for himself.

The Parenthood protects you.

Right?

“What?” J asked, attempting, insanely, to make light of a mood he’d added one thousand pounds to with a single sentence. “I saw a girl outside my window.”

J saw something colder than winter in D.A.D.’s eyes. As if, for a flash, the man were made of ice, standing forever still in the Yard below. Then, a second flash, horrible life, followed by a question J wasn’t prepared for.

“How do you know the word for what you saw?”

“Oh no,” J said. Because they were the first words that came to mind. Because he hadn’t realized he’d told more of the truth by only telling part of it.

What else might he accidentally reveal?

Despite wanting to say her name, wanting to hear himself speak it, he felt like he was sinking, like the Check-Up room had always been an elevator, descending now to the Corner.

Don’t say her name.

No, don’t say anything else at all.

“You told me you didn’t start that naughty little book, J. How do you know the word for what you saw?”

When had D.A.D. moved closer? J hadn’t seen it happen. But there he was, gripping J’s shoulders, spitting crazed words in his face.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW THE WORD GIRL?”

The impossible balancing act almost broke then; J was momentarily incapable of seeing D.A.D. in both the light by which he’d always viewed him and the new illumination cast by…

He couldn’t even think her name. Didn’t even want to use a word that contained her letter. As if he might put her in the Check-Up room, her, magnified by the glass D.A.D. gripped so hard.

But hadn’t D.A.D. given him a way out? A lie?

“I read some of the book,” J said. “I read the word girl.”

D.A.D. turned so fast, his reflection in the wall looked like a man with a permanently blurred face, no longer definable at all.

“Unclean,” he said. The two syllables like knives suddenly stabbing the soles of J’s feet, telling him to run. Run. RUN.

But he only shook, glued, it seemed, to the rubber mats.

The Inspectors looked to each other, then to the floor. They didn’t know what to do with the word any more than J did.

“Help me,” J pleaded to the Inspectors. Then he cried, as his mind seemed to catch fire.

He turned to D.A.D. just in time to see him gesture to Collins and Jeffrey in a way J didn’t recognize.

Then J was being dragged, naked, yelling, from the Check-Up room, dragged down the hall, as doors opened, as his brothers looked, as visions of K weaved about his body and mind, unable to protect him. He and K were still side by side, in his bed, discussing their stolen lives. As he passed F’s confused face, J thought of K’s lips upon his own, her body in his hands, and how smart she had been for figuring it all out first.

As the elevator doors closed, as he saw the twin silver walls meet beyond a veil of horrid misinformation, as he tried to resist the Inspectors but discovered instead the difference in strength between a man and a boy, J saw the entrance of a tunnel caving in, blocking off his last chance to ever see K again.

Because that’s all that mattered. Life, death, truth, lies…seeing K again was everything.

Yes, J thought, as the elevator doors closed, as he struggled to free himself, as he cried, naked, in the grips of the Turret Inspectors, seeing K again, just seeing her face again, meant more to him than getting out of this building alive.

Cheers to a New Beginning

He hadn’t been out of the shelter for two days. Hadn’t stepped foot outside the actual building itself. It was funny, in a way, because here he’d gone from one building he hardly left to another. And here he was trying to get away from that. Had gotten away from that. But now, always within the same four walls, the two sets of bunk beds his entire world for two days. The other three mattresses were occupied by a total of eight different men already. Men. Always men. No women. Not yet. Despite ten years of limited contact with women, here he’d chosen a hideout that had to, by law, separate the men and the women. A homeless shelter couldn’t allow for men to have access to where the women slept. It was funny, sort of, the way the real world was the answer to the one he’d fled. Back there they studied who the separation benefited more. Out here there was no doubt it was the women.

Was two days long enough? He wasn’t sure. He’d showered twice, which was something, and used the laundry in the basement. He had no other clothes on him—he’d left in a hurry—and so he’d had to stand by the washer and dryer wearing only a towel. Nobody came down to the basement during that time, and after a while it began to feel like its own liberation. Standing by a washing machine in a towel. Just one of ten thousand little things he hadn’t done in what felt like ten thousand years.

So what to do after two days? He’d eaten slop in line with the other homeless men. Ate three times a day. Even when he wasn’t hungry. And he didn’t have much on him. Not much of anything. And there was no way he was going to remove any amount of money from his account. An account that had over a million dollars in it. Was the money still there? Did it matter? Did he want that kind of money anymore? Blood money or false money or money earned by lying to two dozen boys for a decade?

No, he didn’t have much. A couple hundred dollars. A wet pair of shoes. A stained T-shirt. A jacket.

What he did have was needs. Not the book. Not even that.

He needed safety. Anonymity. Money. Clothes. A place to stay. A vehicle to keep moving. A friend? Possibly. A phone? Possibly. A new name?

He laughed at this last one, though the laugh was more like an aging cough. A new name. After using a pseudonym for ten years.

He sat alone in the room of bunk beds. He considered his next move. He had to keep moving because he wanted to keep moving, but he wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do. Would they know to look for him here? Would it be easier to find him if he visited more places? More dots on the map? Back in the Parenthood (that word, so ugly to him now, had been ugly for a long time), Richard wielded endless power. But out here? How far was Richard’s reach? How far could Marilyn see? How willing were they to step into the light, to be seen themselves?

Institutionalized, he thought. The word was especially ugly when applied to himself. He’d probably used it in a book before but couldn’t remember it ever sounding so scary. Institutionalized didn’t only mean a man was so used to his environs that he ended up needing them. It also meant that man was changed. And the problem with changed was that he might not be able to change back to the man he was before.

For the first time in a long time, he realized he liked a little of the man he was before. Before the Parenthood. Yes, he saw that man now in a much different way. He’d hated that man so much that he’d agreed to live in a tower, write books for boys who were lied to, lie to the boys himself, all for a pile of money that didn’t look quite as big once he got to sit on it.

Still, he wasn’t sitting on it at all. No. The money was locked up in his not-so-private account the Parenthood had access to. Could they remove the money? Breach of contract? What kind of lawyer would take their case?

Your honor, Warren Bratt broke his contract with the Parenthood. We believe we should be reimbursed the funds allocated him to lie to two dozen boys in the woods. Boys we bought from desperate, often drugged, mothers.

The door to the bunk room opened and Warren looked up quick. He gripped the handle to his mostly empty suitcase.

“This one taken?”

An old man. Once-blond hair. Who knew his actual age? So hard to tell in a place like this. Everybody looked dehumanized. Yet, in a way, they all looked better than Warren. While some had secrets and all had histories, it was unlikely any of them had sold their souls in full.

“Here,” Warren said, rising from one of the lower bunks. “Take mine. I’m checking out.”

“Yeah? Where you going?”

Warren studied the man’s eyes. Why did he want to know?

“Greece.”

The man laughed the way most men laughed in this place: true but harsh. Warren picked up his case and coat and exited the room. Then the shelter soon after.

It was evening. He hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t been outside in two days. With the money he had on him he could take a bus to Florida. Take a bus to Wyoming. Hop a train somewhere, anywhere. Get a job at a local paper. Get a job flipping grilled cheese.

But first…

He’d seen the bar the morning he arrived at the shelter. And oh what a morning that was. Drenched and cold, out of breath and invigorated, righteous and free. But still caged, too. Institutionalized. He’d wanted to enter the bar, but even if it was open, he couldn’t. He simply didn’t have the nerve. Couldn’t find it.

Now he believed he did.

He looked up and down the street. To the windows of the apartments across the street. To the alleys. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was worried he might see. Richard crouching in red? Marilyn hiding behind a lamppost? Back when he was offered the job, there wasn’t any mention of how he might be tracked down if he ever wrote a book about women, printed it off himself, and left a copy for each of the Alphabet Boys. Nope. No word on that front. So…what? What might he see and how would they come after him?

Warren shuffled up the sidewalk. A homeless man, indeed. As he slipped inside the bar, he gave the street, the buildings, the windows, the roofs, one last look.

Inside, warmer, he cleaned the fog from his glasses and eyed the small room. Two unoccupied booths to his left. Two unoccupied booths to his right. Two women sitting at the bar, their backs to him. A young man behind the bar. My God did the young man look clean. Uncluttered. Happy.

“What can I get you, sir?” the guy asked.

Warren took an open stool. “Bourbon,” he said. “Please.”

The word please escaped him in such a genuine way that he almost felt like crying.

It had been a long time.

The bartender served him. Warren sipped. He looked down the bar. Of the two women, the one facing him smiled.

At him.

It had been a long time for that, too.

The woman was close to what he once would’ve called his type. Smart eyes behind kitschy big glasses. Brown hair. An old-school dress. Was this what people considered hip these days? He wouldn’t know. He’d been away for a decade.

Institutionalized.

Warren finished his drink. Considered his next move. Out of the country? It was probably the right thing to do. Leave. Get out entirely. Shave his head. Grow a beard. Devote his life to helping young people know the real ways of the world.

He ordered a second bourbon. The two women down the bar cracked up laughing, and Warren thought what a great sound it was. Oh, how many great sounds had he missed back when all he cared about was being the big fish in whatever body of water he swam in. Oh, what trouble that angry ego had gotten him into. Oh, how distorted the last ten years had been.

Oh boy.

He sipped. He thought of heading south. East. West. Anywhere but back north. Right? Yes. Anywhere but back north.

Yet…

The boys. They were going to need help. Weren’t they? How many of them were spoiled rotten by his book by now? How many young lives had he taken by deciding for them what they should and should not know?

Why hadn’t he pulled each aside? Why hadn’t he talked to the boys directly? He could’ve told them the truth, then told them to be quiet.

Why hadn’t he taken them with him?

Surely, given his state of mind, Warren could’ve killed an Inspector or two. Whoever was on duty that night. It made sound moral sense in hindsight. The murder of an ex-con hiding in the woods, in the name of rescuing two dozen boys from a life of slavery.

He sipped. The women erupted again and Warren looked over at them. Tried to get into the jolly mood. As if he might siphon some of what they were feeling.

Good God, these women. They had no idea what the man down the bar had been capable of. No more so than if he’d been a cult leader. A doctor who prescribed unnecessary medicine. A false prophet, a false author. Here to hurt, not help.

The woman smiled at him again, and Warren understood then that if he was going to begin a life outside the Parenthood, he was going to have to eventually tell someone what he’d done. Probably. Or…if he could just erase the ten previous years, start from there, pick up where he left off…

Could he?

As he smiled back at the woman and raised his glass, as she raised hers in return then blushed for the silliness of it, Warren understood that he couldn’t erase his part in what went on. Not only because a man wasn’t able to turn back time but because the man he had been then was the man who had decided to end up where he was now.

The two women got up and put their coats on, and Warren ordered a third drink and wished he could erase every year he’d lived, erase them all. Start the whole thing over. Identify with being an overly kind person this time around. Eschew a life of darkness. Bury the intellectually superior cloak he’d worn for so many years before agreeing to toss any and all of his soul into a fiery pit for profit.

The women had gone. Warren thought of the roads he’d taken once he fled the Parenthood. Imagined himself taking them again. In the opposite direction. Saw himself approaching the tower with a rifle in hand. Saw Inspectors falling in pools of blood, ex-cons shot in the back. Richard with a barrel to his chest.

The bartender looked over Warren’s shoulder.

Who’s there?

The one woman had come back. Just sat down right next to Warren. Her drunk eyes were huge behind her big frames. Like she was holding two magnifying glasses up to her face. Warren, trying hard to fit into the old world, the real world, ordered a round for them both. They talked, they laughed. Warren caught himself slipping back into old Warren: curt and snobbish. How? How was it possible any vestige of his former persona remained? He saw himself rounding up the Alphabet Boys. He’d answer their questions about the book. He’d tell them everything. They’d learn the truth of the world as the soles of their shoes soaked in Richard’s blood.

Warren was paying his tab suddenly, then leaving the bar with the woman, arm in arm.

It was cold outside, freezing, and she said, Don’t worry, we can go to my place. Warren smiled but he couldn’t stop thinking about the boys. Yes, this was good. A woman. A place to stay. But the Parenthood went on. Did it not? And if the base rule of the constitution was broken…wouldn’t all the boys be sent to the Corner?

And hadn’t he made that happen?

And had it happened already?

He climbed old stairs with the woman. The woman was clearly drunk, laughing, hanging on to him, as Warren held her up, held himself up, too. He hadn’t been quite this drunk in a decade. Good feeling, bad feeling, both. Oh, the boys the boys the boys.

The woman fumbled with her key and Warren helped her. He imagined Richard at the podium in the Body Hall, hands raised, crying out defiantly before his boys. Demanding they tell him who’d read what and how many pages. Surely Richard had to know that much. A simple game of Boats? Surely. The woman half-fell into her apartment and Warren stumbled after her. She turned on the lights and said, This way, more booze. Warren, torn up inside, aware that it was far too soon to make any attempt at lowering himself back into the real world, followed. More booze sounded good. So good.

Nice place, he said. But he didn’t feel nice. Didn’t feel like a good guy at all and definitely didn’t feel like he deserved to be having a good night with, of all things, a woman. And she was holding his hand, leading him through the apartment, through the living room, into the kitchen, by a stove. She was getting glasses from the cupboard. The bottle was already on the counter. She said how much she liked whiskey and the smell of whiskey and she didn’t care what it did to her and suddenly Warren just wanted to leave. Go. This was way too soon. There were two dozen boys whose lives were no doubt in jeopardy because they weren’t even allowed to read about a woman, and here Warren was in a woman’s apartment, getting drunk, doing the exact thing any one of those boys should be able to do. And here she was talking and pouring the drinks and here Warren, his mind a muddle, his soul torn in so many pieces, some of which were irretrievable, already blown by the black winds that circulated through the basement of the Turret, the breath of the Parenthood, and his fleeing the tower, too, didn’t deserve this. Didn’t deserve this at all.

“Cheers,” the woman said, handing him a glass, clinking it with her own. Her eyes looked great. So big and funny. Warren hadn’t seen eyes like this in so long. It was almost as if the woman looked like an odd man to him, a man in costume, a man who had pulled cheerful features from a Halloween bag and slapped them together before heading to the bar. Warren sipped his drink. Thought of the boys drinking milk in the cafeteria, Richard drinking scotch in his office. Could the boys smell it on him? Surely. How could they not? Warren could smell it on the woman, on himself, on the apartment, too. The woman talked about town, about failed relationships, as Warren, nodding along, eyed the counter behind her, the refrigerator, the archway to the kitchen, the living room beyond, the couch and the pair of shoes behind the couch. The ankles in those shoes, too.

“Hey,” he said, trying to smile, not even sure why. “Who’s that hiding behind the couch?”

The woman mock-frowned and looked to the living room. Then she cracked up laughing, but Warren didn’t join her. No no. Because the moment after he asked it, he saw the full-bodied reflection in the glass of the balcony door as clear as his own thoughts were not.

Warren grabbed the woman’s wrist.

“What’s going on here?”

The cold he felt then was much deeper than the winds that had resisted him as he ran from the Turret, ran through the pines, took the roads he hadn’t seen in years.

“Hey,” the woman said. “You’re hurting me.”

Warren let go. He made for the living room. Behind him the woman said, “What do you wanna cheer? Inspections?”

Warren moved quick through the living room as a man rose from behind the couch and a second one stepped out from a doorway Warren hadn’t noticed at all. A third man came through the apartment’s front door. When Warren looked back to the woman, she had no glass in her hand, and her eyes were no longer funny.

“You were easier to find than a deer at a salt lick. A homeless shelter? A bar? A woman? The Parenthood expected more from their creative writer.”

Warren moved for the front door, despite the man who stood in his way. Something sudden and solid happened at the back of his head, and he fell to the carpeted floor.

Dizzy, fading, he noticed there was hardly any furniture, no pictures on the walls. But he hadn’t seen any of this on his way in. His mind had been on the boys. On possibly, insanely, returning to the Parenthood.

And so, he thought, as the four figures crouched around him, he was. He was heading back to the Parenthood.

Heading back to the boys.

Kill ’Em All

One drink. As the Inspectors held J in quarantine. An hour or two. Two drinks. However long it took to prep himself, to make certain he was asking the right questions when the time came to ask them.

Boats, of course. The Parenthood’s only form of surveillance. You couldn’t win Boats without telling the truth.

A lie detector disguised as a game.

J had seen B from his window. Okay. This had happened. He’d recognized the girl as a girl from Warren Bratt’s description in his insane fucking book. Okay. This had happened. B might not have seen him. Didn’t matter. The girl had to go. J had to go.

Who else? Who had J told? Who knew?

Richard stood by his desk, eyeing the living room table he’d soon sit at. He saw the event before it happened, himself in one chair, J in the other; man and boy; father and son; a good old-fashioned game of Boats.

Gray area. The expanse between the rules he and Marilyn had made long ago and how many of those rules had been broken now. Had someone asked him ten years ago what he’d do with a boy who read all of Warren Bratt’s sneaky fucking book, Richard would’ve of course said the boy was no good. Spoiled. He’d have sent him to the Corner, no questions asked. Because he’d have to. Because the Parenthood and the rules he and Marilyn established were more important than the number of boys and girls. If through the years Richard had been responsible for sending every boy but one to the Corner, and if, in the end, that one boy rose to become the brightest, most focused, assuredly original scientist, then so be it. The experiment would be a success. Proof that the mind is capable of unfathomable heights once the elements of distraction are removed. But now, three kids, two Alphabet Boys and one Letter Girl, all in quarantine…but all spoiled rotten?

Take D…

Richard read the book, too. He seethed with each paragraph, growing angrier as the letters played across the pages like passengers on a train coming to destroy a man’s lifework. A lot of bad shit in there. Oh, were there slights at Richard; oh, were there innuendos that implied only a monster could do what the Parenthood had done.

Many.

Yet…the mention of a woman…early in the book the woman at the bar…later, during the gruelingly long monologue, in which Warren spelled out the Parenthood’s mission as though it were imagined by a fool…might not it all come off as science fiction to a boy like D? To a boy who not only hadn’t ever heard the word woman, a boy who had come to expect whimsy and the fantastical in his leisure books, what could it mean? What was the difference between Warren Bratt’s Needs and Lawrence Luxley’s One Big Ollie in the Orchard?

Gray area. So much of it. Higher than the Turret, wider than the Yard. Longer, too, than the winding roads through the pines, the four hundred curves that Warren himself must have taken on foot to reach the first sign of civilization, the tackle shop at the corner of county roads 12 and 13.

Richard smiled, but it did not feel good. He wanted very badly to know what Warren did when he got there. Who he talked to. What he said.

He’d get those answers tonight.

Gray area…

Take B…

The girl confessed to crossing the pines and discovering the second tower. She said she was alone. Said she didn’t see anyone inside the tower. Didn’t make contact with anyone at all. Asked if it was used for storage. Why would the girl tell the truth about one thing and not another? She’d been crying during her confession, trembling and unable to get sentences out without a lot of obvious effort.

Burt cited many reasons the girl might tell only a partial truth.

Covering up for a sister?

Ashamed for having seen something she wasn’t supposed to?

Scared for having seen a boy named J?

But how would B know to be afraid?

Gray area.

So much of it.

Marilyn had a game of Boats scheduled with B in quarantine. If there was a bottom to this fathomless fall, Marilyn would get to it.

Richard, still standing, his red jacket upon the carpet before his desk, shirtless and angry, tried to assure himself that the problem, the disease, the ruination, had been quarantined indeed. But how could he know how many Letter Girls B spoke to? Or how many were with her on her journey through the pines?

Marilyn said it was out of character. B wasn’t the type to explore.

Was she the type to lie? To hide? To shatter a psychological masterwork?

And how many boys had read Warren’s book? And who had J told about the girl out his window? And what other boy looked out his own window as well?

Oh, the word girl sounded so rancid out of J’s mouth. So foreign. As if Richard hadn’t heard it himself in so long that he’d forgetten it existed.

Boats.

Already on his third drink, Richard imagined knowledge spreading through the towers like Rotts, like Vees, like Placasores. For five hallucinatory minutes, he imagined that these diseases were real and not made up by the Parenthood to explain the Inspections. Staring glassy-eyed, he shuddered, imagining those never defined (and certainly never photographed) Placasores spreading from one Alphabet Boy to another until they fanned out into the Yard, where the Letter Girl B picked them up and carried them with her back to the second tower. He imagined Warren loosening the lid on a jar Richard once thought impossible to open. He imagined bugs, millions, scurrying about the Turrets, hiding in cracks, under pillows, in the windows and walls.

He absently brought a hand to his bare arm, swiped at the Moldus crawling there, plucked Vees from his knuckles.

“Kill ’em all,” he whispered.

If this was what the end looked like, he refused to be embarrassed by it. So long as one boy was still clean (and there were many, right?), the experiment was without stain.

He tried to imagine a clean boy in all that gray area. Tried to recall his magnificent Alphabet Boys only a week back, before Warren Bratt betrayed him.

He crossed to his desk, picked up his phone, and pressed the number 1. He and Marilyn had their limited time together, by appointment, in the Glasgow Tunnel, an effort to respect the philosophy of their own experiment. A Plexiglas wall to separate even themselves from each other.

But sometimes a woman’s touch was crucial.

“No,” Marilyn said when she answered the phone.

“No?”

“I will not abort.”

“We could begin anew.”

“A new what, Richard?”

Richard didn’t have an answer for this. In the beginning it was easy to contemplate attempting the experiment more than once. But twelve years deep, it was clear this was their only shot.

“Do you feel it, Marilyn?”

“Feel what?”

“Revolt.”

Some silence. But Marilyn rarely allowed silences to grow. “I think it’s time to do a little parenting, Richard.”

“Speaking of parenting…”

“Yes. The man we found in the Orchard is in your Corner now.”

“How many times has he come?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me. It does.”

“He’d been watching your Turret for many months. It appears ‘Mister Tree’ makes for a reasonable hiding spot.”

“Do we know which one he is?”

“He made no effort to hide it. Told us right from the very beginning who he was here to see.”

“Which one?”

“He’s J’s father, dear. Come to assuage the guilt for having sold him.”

Richard stared into his drink. Believed he could see the ice melting.

“J,” he said. He didn’t like that two controversies surrounded one boy. The odds didn’t feel right.

“You’ll get your answers from him by way of Boats.”

“Oh, Marilyn…to hear him use the word girl.”

“Did he?”

“I told you. He saw B outside his window.”

“But did he use the word girl?”

“Yes. I told you, he—”

“No. You did not.” Some silence. A shuffling of papers. “In Warren Bratt’s book titled Needs, he used the word woman seven hundred times. Her four hundred and fifty. She about the same. But girl…”

Richard brought his drink to his lips, already knowing what Marilyn was about to say, already feeling the bricks of the Turret loosen a little more.

“Not once, Richard. He didn’t use the word once.”

“Oh God.”

“Where did J learn the word?”

“Oh God.”

“Who told him the word, Richard? Who knows it other than…my girls?”

Boats

Richard was seven drinks deep by the time the game got under way. The sky was not dark beyond the windows of his first-floor quarters, nor would it be by the conclusion of any average game of Boats.

But this was no average game.

I saw a girl outside my window.

Richard knew what questions to ask. Knew he’d have to answer some along the way. But what did it matter, telling the truth to a dead boy walking?

They had all day. After all, no parent was coming to pick up the boy.

“How about a game of Boats?” Richard asked.

UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES J would have marveled at D.A.D.’s rooms. His private quarters, the place to which the man retired to privately improve the Parenthood. On a different day J would have been proud to be shown this inner sanctum.

But now J only saw D.A.D.’s lips opening and closing, opening and closing, repeating the one unfathomable word:

He’s going to explain to you why you’re okay. He’s going to make you better.

Even now he turned to the Parenthood for comfort. J was the one who had failed. Not them.

“Comfortable?” D.A.D. asked.

D.A.D. did not look at him as he spoke. He arranged the Boats on the board, the muscles in his arms slinking under his skin like a buried reality. His voice as icy as Q’s ladder.

“I’m fine,” J said. The Inspectors stood by the door, blocking J’s view of it.

A woman stood against the wall.

M.O.M.? J didn’t think so. But whoever she was, he couldn’t stop looking at her, over D.A.D.’s shoulder, until, visibly uneasy, she crossed out of view, behind him.

“Need anything to drink, J?”

D.A.D. smelled like he’d drunk a bottle of medicine before sitting down. But J didn’t want anything himself. Felt too nervous to lift a glass of water.

“No, thank you.”

D.A.D.’s board was nicer than the ones the boys used. The water on the surface was much bluer and the individual waves were as detailed as if K had drawn them. The boats, made of metal, shone, just polished perhaps, and looked so real they could be carrying passengers, students of the game, here to watch them play.

To J, the deeper waters at the center of the board looked real enough to drown in.

“You like Boats, J?”

“Yes, of course. I love Boats.”

J hardly recognized his own voice. Sounded younger than he was when Z was sent to the Corner.

“You hear that, Burt?” D.A.D. said, acknowledging the woman standing behind J. “He loves Boats.” Then, looking J in the eye without humor, without fatherhood, “Let’s connect the nodes.”

They both did, man and boy, sticking the small rubber ovals to their necks, their chests, their wrists.

D.A.D. gripped the line switch. The board hummed to rattling life.

“How did you learn the word girl, J?” D.A.D. asked calmly, sipping from a glass J hadn’t noticed was on the table. “You can’t win a game of telling the truth if you don’t talk.”

J knew the rules well enough. If you lied, your boat did not advance. And if your boat did not advance, everyone in the room knew you lied.

“The girl outside my window…”

“Yes?”

“Her told me the word.”

“She told you the word.”

J’s boat moved forward. Its wake a white mist. Actual droplets descended to the tabletop.

The water in D.A.D.’s board, J realized, was real.

“Thank you,” D.A.D. said. It was clear he was already waiting for his next turn. But J had turns of his own.

“What’s a girl?”

D.A.D. answered without hesitation. “A girl is the opposite sex of a boy. She is necessary in procreation, being the one who carries the baby.”

Ever seen a new boy growing on a Living Tree?

It was D.A.D.’s turn.

“Where did she tell you the word?”

“In my rooms.”

J’s voice trembled as his boat advanced. As a small yellow light turned on outside the captain’s cabin, illuminating the darker waters ahead.

At first, D.A.D. said nothing. Only stared. As if whatever he’d been sipping had turned him to stone. Then, “Your turn.”

J saw red rising in D.A.D.’s face.

“Have you always known what a girl is?”

D.A.D. smiled, but there was nothing happy about it. “Yes. How’d she get in your rooms?”

D.A.D.’s boat advanced. Its light came on, too. J tried to process what D.A.D. had just said. Yes, he’d always known. Then why hadn’t J?

The Parenthood has been lying to us.

Boats had a way of making an Alphabet Boy want to tell the truth, if only to pull it from his opponent sooner.

“She climbed Q’s ice ladder. She came to my window.”

D.A.D. leaned back in his chair. He let out a single clipped syllable of angry laughter.

J’s boat advanced.

“I have so many questions,” J said. “I can barely—”

“Your turn, J.”

J’s mind reeled. A wheel of worries. He took hold of the closest one. “Am I sick?”

D.A.D. did not look him in the eye. “No,” he said. “You’re not sick.”

“But I—”

“One question per turn, J.”

D.A.D.’s boat moved forward, rocking upon bigger waves.

“Which of the other boys did you talk to about her?”

J was still trying to make sense of the last answer. Not sick? Yet…unclean?

Lies. K’s voice in his bedroom in the dark.

“Boats is so much more than a game,” D.A.D. said, a spark of pride in his eye. He ran a finger along the tabletop, the space between himself and the board. When he lifted it, water glistened. “It’s what’s known in the real world as a lie detector. I’ll ask you again. Which of the other boys did you talk to about her?”

The real world, J thought. And what was his own?

“None of them.”

J’s boat moved forward, approaching the increasingly rocky middle of the board.

“Why did you hide the second Turret from us?”

“Because I didn’t want you to know what’s in it.”

D.A.D’s boat advanced. J knew he’d asked a bad question. It was one of the tricks of Boats: asking a question that could be answered halfway.

“How long have you known, J?”

“How long have I known?”

“Play the fucking game, J!”

J leaned back in his seat. His entire body felt bright with panic.

“Her came last night.”

His boat advanced.

“Why did you hide girls from us?”

“I wanted to breed great thinkers, J. The opposite sex gets in the way of this happening. Men waste their lives chasing women.”

D.A.D.’s boat didn’t move. The woman cleared her throat behind J.

D.A.D. said, “I felt my life was a failure. In precisely this way.”

His boat advanced.

“How was your life a failure?”

D.A.D. slammed a closed fist on the table.

“One question!”

D.A.D.’s face went as red as his coat, which hung on the back of his chair. He gulped from his glass. He said, “You say you didn’t mention it to your brothers—”

“No, I didn’t—”

“Do not interrupt me, you little shit.”

J’s mouth snapped shut.

“You say you didn’t mention it to your brothers, but did any of them see the girl?”

J shook his head no.

“Answer the fucking question out loud, J.”

“Not that I know of, no.”

J’s boat reached the rough waters at the middle of the board. He felt water upon his face. The boat sank, momentarily, before rising again.

How deep did D.A.D.’s board go?

“Ask me a question, J.”

“Were you raised, side by side, with girls?”

“Yes.”

D.A.D.’s boat advanced, dipped, stayed down long enough for J to think it had fallen to the floor below, then rose again, level with J’s at center-board.

“How?” J asked. “How did you pass your Inspections growing up?”

“One question, J.”

“But how did you pass?”

D.A.D. rose and slammed both palms on the table. Cold water from the board splashed onto J’s hands.

“The Parenthood is an isolated community, J. In the real world there are millions of children raised without Inspections. You were given the opportunity of a lifetime. And you blew it.”

J only stared.

Millions.

D.A.D. sat again. The table shook. He said, “Did you write down what you know?”

“No.”

J’s boat advanced, but not much. The water pushed back past center-board. Only big truths could deliver a boy to the end.

“Your move.”

“Is my whole life a lie?”

This time D.A.D. did hesitate. He stared long at the two pieces bobbing between them. He sipped his drink. Then, “Do you know there are twenty-year-olds reading at the same level as you right now? That you could pass a university mathematics course? If you’re asking if you’ve been lied to your whole life, the answer is yes. Things have been hidden from you. Many things. But if you’re asking me if the person you are is not real because of this, then I would answer with an emphatic no. I would argue that you and your brothers are more truth than any boy ever was.”

J watched as D.A.D.’s boat advanced. It moved farther than his own had.

“There are no Living Trees?” he asked.

“No,” D.A.D. said, ignoring the double question. “You were created by a weak father and a murdering mother.”

J wiped water from his face. Boats?

Tears?

“What’s her name, J?”

J shook his head no.

“What’s her name, J?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“You know that I’d never hurt her, right?”

J looked to D.A.D.’s troubled face. The man looked as pained as he felt himself. It sounded so true, those few words. Sounded so much like the man J knew D.A.D. to be.

“You wouldn’t?”

Of course not, J! The Parenthood protects!

“Never.”

“I can’t.” Crying now. Unable to make out anybody in the room. Unable to make out the room.

Even the action on the board was a blur.

“What’s her name? Was it B? I don’t think it was.”

“I can’t, I—”

J wiped his eyes and D.A.D. was beside him. The board shifted as the wires connecting the nodes to D.A.D. were pulled.

“Richard!” the woman behind J yelled.

But it was too late. Through the foggy wall of tears, an open hand. J didn’t realize he was falling until he hit the floor.

“You want Vees, J? You want Placasores? TELL ME HER NAME OR I WILL GIVE YOU ROTTS!”

J didn’t want to get up. Didn’t want to open his eyes. Didn’t want to hear D.A.D.’s voice ever again like he’d just heard it.

And, despite K’s words, despite what he believed to be the truth, that Vees and Placasores did not exist…he thought then that maybe they did.

And that maybe D.A.D. meant it when he said he could give them to him.

“K,” he said quietly. “Her name is K.”

Even then, under unfathomable conditions, speaking her name felt good.

Telling D.A.D. the truth did, too.

And his boat advanced. Far.

“Good move, J.” D.A.D. was seated again, removing the nodes from his body. J sat halfway up, saw water spilling over the edges of the table. “Saving the heavy truth for rocky waters. Gives you more distance. You might have won this game after all.” D.A.D. took his coat from his chair back. “But we’re done here.”

As D.A.D. put his arms into his red jacket, J saw it as blood, real blood. As though K’s ax-wielding girls walking the Turret halls had already been to this room.

“D.A.D.?”

But D.A.D. was lifting the black receiver on his desk.

“What’s going to happen to her?” J asked.

The Inspectors stepped to the table. The woman to D.A.D.’s side.

“J is spoiled rotten,” D.A.D. said into the phone. “Your K is, too. No surprise there. K and B. Thick as thieves.”

He hung up.

“D.A.D.?”

D.A.D. was heading for the door.

“Like cockroaches, you fucking kids. I save you from death before you’re even born and somehow I’m the bad man.”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” J said, up now, stumbling toward D.A.D.

The Inspectors were on him fast.

“You ask what’s going to happen to her,” D.A.D. said, “but you never stop to think what’s going to happen to me.”

The Inspectors dragged J to the door. D.A.D. opened it, then bent until his nose was touching J’s.

“You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?”

J only stared. Only thought, K.

Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

Beyond the windows of D.A.D.’s quarters, dark was near.

“You ever seen bread when it sours?”

We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things.

“It grows mold, J. It rots.”

K.

“You’ve gone bad. And the only thing to do with boys who have gone bad is to throw them out.”

D.A.D. gestured, and the Inspectors dragged J out the door.

Meet me in the tunnel…

K would be in the tunnel, too.

…after dark.

Her voice like a door of its own. Not closing. Opening.

J was on his way.

As the Inspectors took him, as he clawed to get loose, as he imagined a wood door with melting blood-red letters, the names of boys and girls, T-H-E C-O-R-N-E-R dripping to the floor, J thought, yes, he would meet her in the basement after dark.

It wasn’t until they were in the staff bathroom, caged momentarily in a nightmare acoustic box, that J accepted the high-pitched wailing that had accompanied them from D.A.D.’s quarters as his own.

“Show Us What You Would Do”

It smelled bad below, something dead, something wet. Having spent his entire life in the clean Turret and the fresh air of the Yard and Orchard, J had nothing to relate it to. The closest association he made was his wet winter clothes on the heater in his rooms, but this thinking didn’t last long, as his reality was unspooling by the second.

The rumbling hum of the boiler brought him to dig his nails into the arms that dragged him through the cobblestoned halls. The Inspectors didn’t seem to mind. Either J’s strength was insignificant or, as he had fleetingly seen in the storm of blurred terror, the men felt too guilty to swat his small fingers aside.

J was certain every door they passed was the Corner, until he could actually read the nameplates, the stencils, the pieces of paper. With his mind’s eye (piqued, cleaved) he saw blood-black letters, the blood of the child, the blood of dead brothers and the Letter Girl J. In his mind’s eye the letters were uneven, the word getting smaller as it was spelled, as though the man responsible for labeling the door did so in a rush to get away from it.

You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?

He heard breathing from up the hall, from behind him, from either side. The Inspectors? It sounded more like the halls themselves were breathing. As if the basement had begun the process of swallowing him.

“Turn around!” he called. “I haven’t done anything wrong! You’ll feel…” He thought of the book Needs and how perfectly Warren Bratt had titled it. “You’ll feel contrite!”

“Easy, J,” Collins mumbled. “This isn’t any easier for us.”

How human the Inspectors looked to him now! How unlike men and like grown-up boys instead!

These men had protected him his entire life. These men had loved him. He’d loved these men!

Let me show you how to tie your shoe, J.

Let me help you with those gloves, J.

I hear you’re doing well with your studies, J. Tell an old man, what’s your secret?

“You’re the ones with secrets!” J yelled as Collins tugged him around a corner and Jeffrey attempted to quiet him with a hand over his mouth.

Luxley once wrote of a gothic castle, and J now believed he’d modeled it after the basement of the Turret. Lanterns high on the walls. Wet stones. Sweat stones? Funereal was a word J had to look up in the Parenthood Dictionary. He loved that word. Dreamed of that word many times. Even tried to use it in an essay in grammar class. But now, here, it was much too real. He was the focus of the funeral, dead soon, the shrieking, bleeding boy.

He reached for the stones in the walls, to put a stop to this forward motion, but the stones were sharp, damp, without pattern, and his fingertips bled like the letters on the door they took him to.

With every supply closet they passed, J thought he heard a smacking, big lips hidden here in the basement, the world beneath his own.

J imagined faces as worried as his own in one office they passed.

“YOU’RE ALL SO SCARED!” he screamed.

Then, swiftly, the fresh clacking of newly arrived boots ahead. A slash of red in the black heart of the basement.

“A perfect match,” D.A.D. said, leading now, his back to J and to the Inspectors that dragged him. “Let them play together in the Corner.”

Was K already there? In the Corner?

“Jesus,” Jeffrey said. “Look at his toes!”

J’s feet were bleeding badly. The big toe on his right foot was almost shredded to the bone. Yet he tried to find purchase with his feet. Tried to slow down the funeral, his funeral, the end to his book of needs.

Where was Q? L and D? Did they know he’d been sent to the Corner? Did they cry? Did they think he deserved it because the Parenthood said so?

“You don’t have to do this!” J yelled to the Inspectors. “If he lies to us, he lies to you!”

D.A.D. stopped. Turned to face J. In the lantern light his face looked more like a stranger’s than it had yesterday morning, when he discovered Warren Bratt’s brilliant book.

“What did you just say, J?”

The Inspectors stopped, too.

J, naked, hanging in the arms of the Inspectors, looked up to Collins. “You don’t have to do this.”

Collins looked away and in doing so revealed, behind him on the wall, an arrow painted as red as D.A.D.’s gloves.

J felt hope.

Oh, K, oh, K, oh, K.

And just beyond D.A.D., J saw the tunnel entrance itself. A gap in the wall. Something too dark to be a closet, too wide for an office door.

“Let him go,” D.A.D. said.

Collins and Jeffrey only stared. Had D.A.D. changed his mind?

“You mean it?” Collins asked.

“I always mean it.”

The Inspectors let J go.

J rubbed his shoulders and his armpits where they’d been holding him.

“And what would you do,” D.A.D. asked him, “if you didn’t listen to me, if you could make up your own mind? Hmm? Where would you go?”

D.A.D. spread his arms out, mocking J with false options.

J looked to Inspector Collins. Inspector Jeffrey. How different they looked without the dogs behind them. How different they looked, slouched, guilty, against the walls in the basement.

“Show us,” D.A.D. said. “Show us what you would do.”

J stood up straight, inhaled deep.

Then he ran.

Past D.A.D. as the man reached down to stop him.

J turned right, entered the darkness of the tunnel, felt free momentarily, invisible to both D.A.D. and the Inspectors, undetectable by the Parenthood, gone. Behind, already far behind, he heard the echoes of shoes on gravel.

“K!” J called.

His voice came back to him, swallowed then repeated by the throat of the tunnel.

K!…K!…K!…K!…K!…K!

The steps behind him were losing speed, losing volume.

K!…K!…K!…K!…K!

He was almost free, it seemed, free now in the darkness.

K!…K!…K!…K!…

Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

“K! I’m here!”

D.A.D.’s laughter behind, the huffing of the Inspectors. Were they close again?

“K!” he cried.

And K responded. K’s voice in the tunnel. Here.

But it was too late for him to recognize it as a warning.

“J, STOP!”

His nose struck the Plexiglas first, the impact crushing it to the side of his face. The rest of him followed. His teeth, cheeks, and chin flattened to the divider.

K screamed his name again as J was thrown back from the wall and fell hard to the tunnel’s dirt floor.

Lights came on.

On his back now, J brought a hand to his bleeding nose. Through watery eyes he saw what he’d hit. He saw K on the other side of it. And beyond her, a mirror of the blackness he’d run through.

As the blood poured from his nose and outlined his lips, J smiled.

Meet me…

But K was pointing behind him, telling him to get up, GET UP, GET UP!

There was blood on K, too. All over her face and hair. On her hands and arms.

“What happened to you?” J said, trying to stand.

But K was shaking her head no. No no. Turn around. Don’t think of me. Don’t be distracted by me.

The Inspectors tackled him to the floor, his teeth smashing a second time.

K pounded on the glass.

Don’t worry, he tried to say. Don’t worry, K!

A hand went over his mouth, then his eyes. Then he was being dragged again. Back.

Between fingers he saw the color red rushing to the glass divider. Saw D.A.D. pointing at K. Saw K reach for the tunnel’s dirt side. Heard D.A.D. yelling at her.

The lights went off. He swiped the hand from his mouth.

“LET ME GO!” J yelled.

But they pulled him from the tunnel, back into the cobblestoned halls. Then deeper into the basement.

J, blind and bleeding, remembered D.A.D. as he’d looked just before the lights in the tunnel went off. Saw the fear and confusion on the man’s face.

He looked more afraid than K did.

When Collins finally removed his hand from J’s eyes, someone tugged hard on his hair.

D.A.D. again. He brought his nose to J’s broken face.

“How does it feel to know the one decision you made on your own was a bad one?”

But D.A.D. didn’t wait for an answer. He looked quick down the hall, back toward the tunnel.

J heard a creaking behind him. Jeffrey opening a door. He craned his neck enough to see something he didn’t think even Lawrence Luxley could’ve imagined: A spot where two basement walls met was revolving, opening to a hidden room.

It didn’t matter that the door looked nothing like the one he’d been raised to fear. It didn’t matter that there was no label on it at all.

It was the Corner, no matter what J said it was.

“I’m sorry,” Collins said.

J fell as he was shoved hard into the room. There he saw scant light from a distance, felt a concrete floor beneath his scratched palms, and heard harsh wheezing from only a few feet away.

“K?” he asked. But he knew she wasn’t in here with him.

As D.A.D. yelled for the Inspectors to follow him, the door swung closed.

“No,” a voice answered. “I’m not K.”

J was too weak to be afraid of it.

“Who’s in here?” he asked.

A man leaned forward on what J’s eyes now told him was a wooden bench. The man wore cracked glasses, and his face and arms looked as battered as J’s own.

“Lawrence Luxley,” the man said. “We’ve met.” J’s eyes hadn’t adjusted enough to see the sad smile. “But you can call me Warren.”

Two Markers in the Dark

“Jesus Christ,” Warren said. “They didn’t even let you get dressed?” Then, “Come on, sit down.”

His voice was hoarse. As if he’d been yelling.

“I don’t belong in here,” J said.

“If there’s one person who knows you don’t belong here, it’s me.”

In the dim light of the second room, J saw two markers in the dirt.

“Sit down,” Warren said.

J did, feeling the cool metal lockers against his back, relief in his bleeding feet.

“I think they went after K.”

“Where is he?”

“Her,” J said.

Warren was quiet. Then he chuckled. “My God,” he said. “Things have changed quickly around here.”

“She came to my rooms. She figured it all out. Everything you were trying to tell us.”

“So you read the book?”

“Some of it.” Then J gave Warren the most exhausted, the most meaningful and meaningless compliment he’d ever received. “It’s the best book in the world.”

“Thank you,” Warren said, holding back many emotions. “You don’t seem very surprised to discover Lawrence Luxley is also Warren Bratt.”

J stared into the darkness, his eyes still adjusting.

“I’m just worried about K.”

“I understand. But worry about us, too. We’ve got probably ten minutes to live.”

Some silence then.

“What’s going to happen to us?” J asked.

“I can’t say for sure. But it can’t be worse than what’s upstairs.”

J understood.

“Are we going to die in here?”

“Yes.”

J looked to the scant light emanating from the second, deeper room. It stretched into this one, curling over a concrete lip like a piece of yellow fabric. At the very extent of its reach, J saw the soles of two shoes.

He sat up quick.

“That’s a person!” he said. “Who is that?”

He hurried to the body on the floor. As he rolled it over, he saw it was a man. Old enough to be an Inspector. Old enough to be D.A.D.

He inched away from the dried blood upon the man’s chest.

Warren said, “I think it’s one of your fathers.”

“What does that mean?”

“One of your real fathers. Here to see if his son was okay.” Then, “Hasn’t been dead long, I don’t think. Minutes, maybe, before I arrived.”

J inched toward the body again, touched the man’s head, his shoulders. He opened the dead eyes with his thumbs. Closed them again.

He thought of a figure crouched behind Mister Tree far below his eighth-floor window.

“We’re gonna die like him,” J said. “Just like this.”

“Well,” Warren said, “I should know more about this than I do. But what I believe will happen is that door we came through is going to open. Someone is going to come through it. And, yes, they’re going to kill us.”

J stood up quick.

“So let’s not let them!”

A cracking sound from out in the hall and J and Warren froze.

“It’s the Parenthood,” Warren whispered. “Still breathing.”

They stared at the door a long time.

“We have to try to get out of here,” J said. “When they come. When the door opens.”

Warren shook his head. “Go ahead and try. And my God I hope you succeed. But me? I don’t deserve to get out of here. I’m one of the monsters who lied to you.”

“But you tried to help!”

“A little too late.”

J stepped to him in the dark, thinking instinctively that he needed this man to help him, that he couldn’t make it out of this room without the help of an adult, a man, a member of the Parenthood.

Still looking for the Parenthood to protect him.

But the Corner door opened before he reached him.

J turned fast, squinting at the light from the hall. Warren spoke first, and the fear in his voice scared J more than the hooded figure that entered.

“Couldn’t look us in the eye, you coward? Had to wear a hood?”

“You,” the figure said, pointing a tool at Warren. “Go stand in the corner.”

J recognized the tool from one of K’s drawings. But he didn’t know what it could do.

He inched away from it, toward the corner of the room.

“Not you.”

Warren stood up. “You’re gonna have to kill me standing as I am. I’m not standing in the fucking corner.” Then, “Who are you? Collins? Jeffrey?”

The figure raised the tool level with Warren’s head.

“No!” J hollered. “Please! He tried to help me! He tried to help!”

“That’s the last thing they wanna hear right now,” Warren cried. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Go on! Do it!”

But the figure lowered the tool and turned its hooded head to J. As it did, J smelled something sweet enough to break through the despair.

He had no way of knowing the pillowcase was worn the same way Marcia Jones had worn it in Judith Nancy’s White Lies. But he could’ve picked that smell out of a forest.

“K?”

“No,” the voice said. The unmistakable voice of a girl. “I’m Q.”

She removed the pillowcase, revealing only the third woman J had ever seen in his life.

Warren opened his eyes.

“Is K okay?” J asked, astonished, breathless.

“Who is he?” She nodded toward Warren.

J saw that Q’s face was streaked with as much blood as K’s had been on the other side of the wall in the tunnel. He understood she’d already killed today. Maybe many.

“This is Warren Bratt,” he said. “He’s on our side.”

She stared at Warren. “Can you get us out of here?”

“You mean can I get you to the real world?” Warren asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

“All right,” Q said. She lowered the tool. “Get us out of here, then.”

Warren went to the Corner door.

“Where’s Richard now?” he asked her. And the way he asked it, J understood that Warren planned to kill today, too. Maybe many.

“We have a plan,” she said.

“We?”

Q nodded. “We got everyone else.”

Revolt

Earlier that morning, as J still slept the troubled sleep of knowledge, K slipped quietly out of his rooms. She was not worried about encountering any of the staff. If someone saw her, she would kill him.

She got the chance before leaving the building.

Passing through the Body Hall, through the swinging kitchen door, she stopped and stood motionless, facing a man holding a plate, water filling a sink behind him.

“Whoa,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

K walked toward him, a direct line, as if there was nothing he could do to frighten her.

She saw the way his eyes shifted from one side of the kitchen to the other, perhaps looking for help.

She saw the way his lips parted, as though ready to call out, to announce the arrival of a girl in the boys’ Turret.

And she saw, too, as she slashed his neck with a knife from a magnetic rack less than a foot from where he stood, the way the skin of his neck split easily.

He fell to his knees.

K took hold of him by the back of his white shirt, dragged him out through the garbage door and into the Yard. It wasn’t until she had him buried in pine needles and snow that she allowed herself to think, You’ve killed your first adult.

She was grateful for the man in the kitchen. For teaching her how easily it could be done.

She was ready, she knew, to do more.

Within two hours of returning to her Turret, she knew that most of the Letter Girls were, too.

Some girls refused to believe what they were hearing. Some believed but wouldn’t partake. In total, four decided to stay in W’s bedroom until it was over. G stood guard to make sure none of them attempted to reach M.O.M.

E was especially hysterical. The news went against her nature in more ways than one; she’d modeled her entire self-image after M.O.M. Down to how she responded to the insane information.

“K,” she said, attempting to maintain a civil smile. “You are scaring me.”

K didn’t have time to convince. Rather, pressing the point of her knife to E’s back, she forced her sister into the dog area of the fifth-floor Check-Up room. She didn’t say anything encouraging upon exiting, didn’t try to calm her.

There was simply no time.

Q helped a lot. Including removing B from quarantine, which consisted of unlocking a first-floor room and letting B out. B, finding it difficult to let go of her former life, despite siding with K and Q, said she had a game of Boats scheduled with M.O.M.

“Not anymore,” Q said. “Never again.”

They started in the basement of their Turret. At first, some of the girls ran from what K and Q did. But the bloodletting revealed more than the colors running through the veins of the Parenthood staff; with each office they entered, the Letter Girls saw more and more evidence of the lies K, B, and Q were convinced of. A thing called a “Burt Report” removed more doubt. And the paltry marker for their sister J (in the Corner!) took the rest.

With the other Letter Girls on board, the job of killing the adults went much faster. But it wasn’t without its emotional repercussions.

Crying, Q and P slit the throats of two women who worked in a room labeled PRINTING. In ACCOUNTING, F and H held down a much older woman as B stabbed her repeatedly in the chest. A whistling janitor was clubbed in the nose by a shrieking R. Z strangled a nurse with her bare hands. Then shook for the five minutes following.

They chanted as they worked, unified by a mantra K had given them, their voices marred by terror:

“Take…it…back.”

The three words could be heard in almost every hall of the basement, as the staff was swarmed by Letter Girls armed with everything from knives to paperweights.

Blood erupted in the offices, the women who were yet unaware that the Parenthood had been sliced open. Blood on the cobblestone walls. Blood on the supply-closet doors. Bloody handprints on every door.

On Floor 1, they slaughtered the cooks, the teachers, the cleaners. B gutted a nurse with a billhook. Q half-beheaded Professor Ullman with a spade. They spent a lot of time hiding. Waiting in the shadows of the halls. Hiding in the corners of doorways. Listening to the otherwise everyday movements and motions of the Parenthood.

They searched, too.

K found Inspector Krantz in the same staff bathroom they’d passed through on their way up from the basement.

She recognized the boots under the stall door and didn’t hesitate to kick that door in. The flat metal cracked the Inspector’s nose, bringing K the immediate satisfaction of immediate blood. As Krantz brought her hands to her face, K shattered her skull with a hammer. Then she shattered it again. And again. Until the woman had completely fallen to the side of the toilet, squeezed between it and the stall wall.

Q slammed Inspector Rivers’s head in a classroom door until Rivers stopped crying out for help.

K used a saw on Judith Nancy.

The leisure writer was asleep in a bedroom not far from M.O.M.’s quarters. She woke to a prickling sensation, then all-out pain, as K broke the skin on her belly, the saw going back and forth, digging, digging.

“What’s going on?” Nancy cried. Then, “You.”

As if, even under unfathomable duress, she’d admitted to having seen this moment coming.

B and Q stabbed Nancy in the eyes. The ears. The mouth. K broke her fingers and, crying, said, “You’ll never write again!” But the woman was already dead by then.

So much killing done, the Letter Girls congregated outside the Body Hall. For the first time in their lives, they felt the power of numbers. K sent B to release E. To tell G to let the other four out of W’s room. There was nobody left for the Letter Girls who weren’t involved to warn.

Let M.O.M. know. Let her come looking for K.

Twenty minutes later, just as the first slash of gray interrupted the sky and sent word through the glass hallway that the sun was on its way down, M.O.M. exited her quarters to find a band of Letter Girls, armed and bloody, their eyes unfathomably without innocence. But Marilyn knew better. Her girls were looking at her, for the first time, out the front of their eyes, having been shown the light by someone, someone who had unearthed the truth of their lives.

She didn’t need Richard to have told her it was K. That was clear when K spoke to her first.

“Upstairs,” K said.

M.O.M., twelve years used to giving commands, twelve years used to molding their minds how she deemed fit, did not make to move. Rather, she made to scold.

“Who do you think you are?” she said. “Conduct yourself like a lady this instant.” Then, perhaps because nothing changed in the eyes of the girls, and certainly not in K’s, she made to turn back to her office, but B sliced her hand to the bone with a tool Marilyn recognized as being used often in the Yard. As the blood spilled to splash the outfit she’d picked for a game of Boats with the very girl who’d cut her, she screamed. A brief and horrible sound the girls never expected to hear from her lips.

“Upstairs,” K repeated.

THE SEVERITY OF the situation was self-evident, but Marilyn was still thinking of her hand. Thinking of B, who had cut it. B, who should have been in quarantine. B, who should have been sent to the Corner last night, when she confessed. Had she and Richard lost their minds? Had they been blinded by the very children they’d worked so hard to raise?

“A,” K said, addressing her sister that had the most mature voice. “You stay in the office. If the phone on the desk rings, pick it up. Pretend to be M.O.M. Okay?”

“Okay.”

A, covered in blood, entered M.O.M.’s office and, after a moment’s hesitation, sat in a big chair at a big desk. Some of the other girls stared into M.O.M.’s quarters—still, even now, awed.

Then K had a knife to M.O.M.’s back. Marilyn didn’t need to be told again. She let the girls lead her to the elevator. Q pressed the button. When the doors opened, M.O.M. removed her glasses and turned to smile at her girls. Her eyes looked much older than even the last time they’d seen them.

“What’s upstairs?” she asked.

“We can lie to you,” K said. “For twelve years if you’d like. We can make up something that’s up there. We can hide words from you and pretend we’re not going to do what we’re going to do. Or you can get in now and get it over with.”

M.O.M. scowled. “And who do you think is responsible for you being so smart, K? Who made it so you can plan at all? Your mother, your real mother, was prepared to butcher you.”

V held the elevator doors open.

“In,” K said. “To the roof.”

“The roof?” M.O.M. asked. More than one girl gasped at the fear in her eyes. L even pointed at it. “And why the roof, dear?”

B slashed at her belly. Blood rose to the surface of her white pantsuit. M.O.M., still gripping her hand, screamed again.

Then many girls shoved her into the elevator at once. But only K, B, and Q rode up with her.

As the doors closed, the remaining girls’ stoic expressions vanished and Marilyn knew this had all been planned. Even this. The three girls and herself. Riding up.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve been in an elevator,” she said to K.

An eleventh-hour attempt at diplomacy?

It was Q who had pressed the highest floor and it was Q who got out first, holding a long blade to M.O.M.’s chest as K and B forced her out of the elevator.

“Upstairs,” K said, acknowledging the ladder at the end of the hall.

“The roof,” M.O.M. repeated.

“You can see the Placasores from there,” B said.

“Don’t get cute with—”

Q slashed M.O.M.’s ankle with the blade. M.O.M. cried out.

“Upstairs,” K repeated.

Marilyn attempted to walk with dignity, her shoulders square, her chin level with the floor. But her ankle, her wrist, her belly, all brought her to stumble.

B climbed the ladder first.

“I want you to think very hard about what you’re doing,” M.O.M. said. Q made to slash her again, and she slapped the girl’s hand away. “I’m going. I’m going.”

K and Q followed her up.

On the roof, the sun’s descent was even more evident. K thought, Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

“To the edge,” she said.

“No,” M.O.M. said, her chin higher than level now.

Q slashed her thigh.

Marilyn fell to the roof floor. She tried to grip her leg with both hands, but the one B had cut simply wouldn’t work. She cried out, eyes to the sky, as Q slashed her chest.

Then, perhaps born of an instinct greater than her breeding, Marilyn tried to crawl for her life. The girls did not marvel at her will to live. Rather, they nodded as she got closer to the very place they wanted her to be.

Once there, M.O.M. seemed to recognize, distantly, that she’d reached the furthest point she could. She smiled. It was perhaps the warmest expression the girls had ever seen on her face.

She had crawled to the Corner.

“Spoiled rotten,” Q said. The other girls did not laugh. Below, however, voices could be heard, some more lively than others.

When M.O.M. looked over the edge of the Turret, her one good hand gripping the corner where the two ridges of concrete met, she saw the faces of the other Letter Girls staring up. They were standing around a hole in the ground, a big one, and her first thought was, Would you please look into this, Krantz?

But it was M.O.M. who looked into it, as some life remained in her head, even after K had severed it from her body with an ax.

She could almost count the bricks of the Turret as her head fell down to the Yard.

The last thing she saw was a makeshift marker in the hand of one of the girls—which girl she could no longer tell. It was certainly an unworthy tombstone for a woman such as herself. The marker had three lowercase letters and no more upon it:

She had just enough time remaining to attempt an understanding, to sound the three letters out, before the life finally left her, her brain run dry, and her head landed with a wet thud in the dirt. Had she one more half minute of thought, she might have noted the perfect arc of the fall, the precise depth of the grave.

All a perfectly executed experiment, conducted by her brilliant, precocious, and undistracted Letter Girls.

Revenge

After J was shoved into the Corner, Richard, flanked by both Inspectors, returned to the tunnel’s entrance, where the phone was set in the stone wall.

The Letter Girl K had been on the other side of the glass in the tunnel. Covered in blood.

Whose?

This is not a mutiny, he told himself. It’s an isolated incident and J has been dealt with. Now K will be dealt with, too.

The other boys were on lockdown. Confined to their rooms. J’s telling him that nobody else had seen the girl wasn’t good enough. Even if it did register as honest with the game. J might not have known who saw what. Richard would find out.

But first, why wasn’t Marilyn answering her phone?

He considered aborting the whole experiment. Considered rounding up all the Alphabet Boys, lining them up against the Turret bricks, shooting them one by one.

Should he panic?

He hung up the phone. He didn’t want to panic. J was in the Corner. Surely K had escaped her own Corner. Surely she’d been put back in by now.

He considered sending the Inspectors to the second Turret. But no. That would jeopardize all of Marilyn’s girls.

What else to do but go up? Call Marilyn again from his office?

“Watch the Corner,” he told Collins and Jeffrey.

He’d already put together an explanation for J’s absence by the time he reached the first floor. He refined it in the elevator to the third. J simply didn’t fit in. He was sent to a new Parenthood, where boys like him might thrive. Life was about overcoming sadness, boys, my boys. Lose and live. Live and learn.

He wouldn’t tell them about J in the Corner. Not yet. He needed more information from the others before he froze them with living nightmares.

No man can withstand this much guilt.

Warren had said that to him earlier, as Richard walked him from quarantine to the Corner. But it was something else the fat troll had said that really irked him.

Women don’t distract, Richard. They inspire.

As the elevator rose, Richard reminded himself that he was indeed a big thinker. He cited the speeches he’d given, the events he’d planned, the boys he’d raised.

Oh, how the staff must revere him! All he’d done for them! All they’d seen him do.

He had no way of knowing that both Collins and Jeffrey were killed by the Letter Girls Q and B outside the Corner that harbored Warren and J.

He had no way of knowing Gordon had a garden fork in his belly, that he lay flat on the white carpet of the Body Hall.

You can’t consider yourself remarkable, Richard thought, without being disappointed by the people around you.

And, ah, what a disappointment J was in the end.

When the number 3 lit up and the bell announced his arrival, Richard had convinced himself the Parenthood would be stable once again. Perhaps it would even grow stronger for this.

He stepped off the elevator and entered the hall.

He paused.

The hall looked the same. The doors and the floors.

So what was different?

Richard sniffed the air. Possibly it was the floor shift, boxes of belongings moved about, strange scents rising.

He waited. He didn’t like it. Whatever it was. He didn’t like it.

He went first to F’s door and opened it. Inside, F the boy and F the girl stood side by side, facing him.

They held knives.

A vision as impossible as A and Z, risen from the dead.

An Alphabet Boy and a Letter Girl.

Together.

“Hi, Richard,” F said. He wagged the knife.

Richard fled the room. Went to X’s, opened it.

X the boy and X the girl.

Holding knives.

Do not panic. Do NOT panic. If one boy is secure, JUST ONE BOY…

Richard moved to G’s door and kicked it open. Before he could register that G the boy and G the girl were walking toward him, carrying axes, the door to the stairs opened down the hall.

W the boy holding hands with W the girl.

D the boy and D the girl.

“D,” Richard said, the authority in his voice irrevocably lost, “you have been a bad boy!”

Ruined, Richard. Every one of them.

No…just this floor…just this floor…

What are you going to do? Start again?

“Unclean! You’re all unclean!” he cried, inching back toward the Check-Up room door. “You all have Placasores! Are you happy, F? STOP SMILING! STOP SMILING AT ME!”

Richard charged and F stuck him with a knife.

Gaping at the blood from his gut, the blood on his fingers, Richard looked to Q, his Q. When had Q arrived?

“My boy…”

When had they all arrived? The floor was full of them. And only more were coming through the stairwell door.

“Inspection,” B the girl said.

Richard looked to her.

She’s covered in blood. Where’s Marilyn?

“Inspection.”

They were all saying it. All the boys and girls.

“What do you mean to do?” he said.

“INSPECTION!” they yelled.

From the far end of the hall, the elevator doors opened. When had it gone back down?

In it, J. The Letter Girls K and Q.

Warren Bratt.

“Warren,” Richard said. “No no. You can’t be a part of this. This is…this is murder, Warren. You did not sign up for this! Think of your life! You’re throwing your life away!”

“INSPECTION!” the boys and girls yelled.

Forty-nine of them.

“Get in the Check-Up room,” B the girl said. But it might have been any one of them.

“Marilyn predicted you’d revolt at age twenty,” Richard said, trembling, one hand on the Check-Up room door. “But here you’ve done it at twelve.” Then, a smile. “See how advanced you are? My boys…?”

The kids stepped toward him. Armed. All of them.

He opened the Check-Up room door and stared down at the handle.

“This door has never opened from the outside,” he said. “Who reversed the locks?”

From the crowd of them, nobody raised a hand.

Tears in his eyes, Richard nodded.

“That’s my boys.”

He entered the room. He turned to face them.

“What will you do without me?” he asked.

But they gave him no response.

And J closed the door. And K locked it.

Out

Two days after locking Richard in the third-floor Check-Up room, Warren and the forty-nine kids discovered a shack a mile through the pines behind the girls’ Turret. Inside, they found three sleeping men. The cabin smelled of alcohol and smoke. Warren recognized them as classic Parenthood employees: ex-cons with a real need to hide.

He woke them as the kids stood outside the cabin door. He told them their employers had been killed, that they would want to pack up and leave if they didn’t want to meet the same end.

The only question they asked was how to get their money out of their individual accounts. Warren told them how. Then, with only a bag of clothes each, they left the cabin, the pines, and the Parenthood.

The boys and girls spent a month in the two Turrets. Warren told them they had to. Had to eat. Pack. Plan. They couldn’t just leave this world and enter the next one. They needed some guidance. Some wisdom. They needed to know the rules of the real world, no matter how unreal it was going to feel.

They all read Needs. Cover to cover. Boys and girls.

Most avoided the third floor of the boys’ Turret, but not all. In the early days of their stay, some enjoyed listening to the starving man moaning on the other side of the metal door. And when those moans became weak utterances, a few boys and a few girls snuck inside. Just to see.

“He’s still dressed in red.”

“Thin as a blue notebook.”

“His hair is longer; his nails are longer.”

“He looks like a statue. Stuck that way.”

“Reaching.”

“Reaching for a magnifying glass on the floor.”

Warren didn’t need to see this, though he understood why the boys and girls did. Their accounts grew more ghastly and, in direct proportion, a sense of justice expanded.

K and J did not avoid the third-floor Check-Up room. Just like they didn’t avoid the feelings they were experiencing for one another. In a way, it was easy to pinpoint: Their having met was the catalyst for the freedom they were all preparing themselves to enjoy. But in another, it was hard to make sense of the urges, the soft smiles, the endless desire to kiss one another’s lips, to hold hands in the Orchard, to lie beside one another at night.

Nobody was as scared for the real world as K and J. But if there was one thing the end of the Parenthood taught them, it was that a boy and a girl couldn’t be brave unless they were scared of something to begin with.

The others noticed this. Their sisters and brothers came to them for reassurance. And K and J tried their best to give it.

Yet, despite a man slowly perishing in one of the two buildings they temporarily still called home, despite the unfathomable and sudden responsibility of forty-nine twelve-year-olds, Warren Bratt was much more worried about a word that kept coming up.

And that word was not Inspection.

“You guys keep saying that,” he’d say to the Alphabet Boys and the Letter Girls. “But you realize we can go anywhere, right? Anywhere in the world?”

“Yes,” they’d say. “We know,” they’d say.

“So why?” Warren would ask. Over and over he’d ask, “Why do you want to go there? Of all places…Why there?”

“Because,” they’d say. “Your book,” they’d say.

And they continued to say it until the incredible day came that they left the Turrets behind.

They even said it on that very day.

“We want to go to Milwaukee.”

-