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 h
eightened 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 d
eeper 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.
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