Maybe they’d even catch the end.
“How far do you think it is?” Q asked.
“We don’t know,” B said. “But we can guess.” She stopped in a particularly bright shaft of moonlight filling a particularly open pool of forest. She removed a folded piece of paper from the back pocket of her black slacks.
“You brought one of my drawings,” K said.
“Of course I did.” The three girls huddled together, B holding the drawing out before them. “Based upon its width and height we ought to be able to determine its distance.”
“But we don’t know what it is,” Q said. “It could be something very wide that looks very thin from so far away.”
“True. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it’s the width of a tree.”
“But we don’t know if that’s accurate.”
“We don’t. But it’s something. And Professor Huggins always says that—”
“A little something is better than a lot of nothing,” K and Q said at once.
“Right. So let’s study this drawing. And let’s consider the mystery object. To scale.”
They took ten minutes to do so. Despite their awareness of the inaccuracies of their method, they determined the thing to be between three and four miles away. If they moved at an average of fifteen minutes per mile (slowed by the trees; no straight line out there), they might have enough time to determine what it was, turn back, and slip inside the Body Hall just as Ugly was ending.
“But we gotta keep moving,” B said. “No more calculations. And we won’t be able to stay long with it, whatever it is.”
“And if we haven’t reached it after forty-five minutes of traveling, then we just turn around,” K said.
None of them liked this idea, but K was right. They couldn’t risk missing the return to the Body Hall. They could, of course, tell M.O.M. they were in the Orchard, they were in their rooms, anything other than the truth, but none of them felt comfortable with outright lying.
Not yet.
“Why wouldn’t we just tell her we wanted to figure it out?” Q asked. “I think M.O.M. would be happy to hear that some of her Letter Girls would rather solve problems than watch a film in the dark.”
“Totally,” B said.
“Probably,” K said, thinking of the interest M.O.M. and the Inspectors showed in her drawings. She almost said, But I just don’t like the way they looked at each other. I don’t like the way they keep asking me about the drawings without telling me why.
But she didn’t.
A half hour deep, the sky had brightened, the moon higher than when they’d set out. The girls no longer talked, as the clock they’d set at their last stop proved too thought-consuming to think of anything else. Each in turn imagined the movie playing out in the Body Hall, the arc of the story, as it crested past the first quarter and headed toward the first third, the moment in which they’d better locate their mystery object or turn around, defeated. K and B compared compasses as the summer night sky warmed them, causing both to sweat, both to breathe hard from the constant ducking and pulling branches aside.
Then, as if she hadn’t actually expected them to find anything, B gasped.
“What?” Q asked. But she didn’t have to wait for an answer. B was pointing ahead.
“Lights,” K said.
Not from the moon.
The three girls looked at one another and, without discussing it, used the nearest trees as cover. Whatever they were expecting to find so far out in the pines, it was not something with lights.
“This certainly changes our guesses,” Q said.
B looked to K, and in that moment both felt a seed rattle somewhere inside their bodies; perhaps this experience had the potential to grow into something bigger than either had planned on.
K considered turning around. For the betterment of her sisters. Before she got them into something she hadn’t meant to at all.
“Wait a second,” she said.
“What?” B asked. “We don’t have time.”
“What if what we discover is something we shouldn’t find? What if M.O.M. is worried about what she saw in my drawings because she knows it’s unsafe? For us.”
“Worried?” Q repeated. “You never said she was worried.”
“We did, too,” B said. Then, “Well, we said she was interested. Wasn’t that close enough?”
“No,” Q said.
“Okay,” K said. “Right now we’re out here in the pines. That’s all that matters. And if we turn around right now we might be avoiding something…”
“Something what?” Q asked.
“I don’t know. Something we don’t want in our lives.”
The three looked toward the hazy light that seemed to emerge like fog from the coming pines. Like snowy frost on the eve of the Effigy Meet.
“Well,” B said, stepping ahead. “I for one would like to get to the bottom of this.”
“Me, too,” Q said. “I’m not sure I could turn back now.”
“Our own movie,” B said. “Let’s see how it ends.”
“Our own movie?” K said, relieved that her sisters weren’t scared enough to stop. “What would you call it? That feels like an important question right now.”
Q said, “I’d call it Three Letter Girls and a Discovery.”
“And does it have a happy ending?” B asked.
But her sisters didn’t answer.
The needles were loud under their boots. The branches loud as they pulled them aside.
And the closer they got to the source of the lights, the more the light resembled night in the Yard back home. The floodlights K had tried to dull for so many years, drawing the drapes of her bedroom window before bed.
A few more steps and the light was strong enough to fill the spaces between all the trees, so that it looked to K like the pines broke up the light rather than the other way around. Behind her, B and Q moved steady.
But K saw it first.
The One Tree.
The different treetop.
The spire.
She stopped and pointed, but B spoke first.
“Oh wow. That’s it.”
“That’s it,” K echoed.
“Well, it’s definitely not a bald treetop,” Q said. “It’s a spire.”
“Like the one on the Turret,” B said.
“Exactly the same,” Q said.
“Come on,” B said. “We don’t have much time.”
“How much?” K asked.
B checked her watch. “Five minutes?”
“Really?”
“If we wanna be safe. Yes.”
K advanced first. B and Q followed. Q tapped B on the shoulder. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” she said.
“What do you mean?” B asked. K was getting farther ahead. Her form was cut by the light, then made impossibly slim, before she vanished into the remaining trees that separated them from whatever held the spire.
“If this is something we should know about, M.O.M. would’ve told us.”
“Well, of course! We’ve been saying that the whole time.”
They moved fast then, trying to catch up to K, unable to turn away no matter what sort of eleventh-hour admonishment they felt. They couldn’t hear K moving anymore and found out why, as B ran into her best friend’s back, knocking K out onto a grassy open field. B, stumbling, almost fell after her. Instead, she found her balance and, halfway to standing up, was frozen by the sight of the brick tower rising up, up, up, to the spire so high above them.
“Um, K?”
K was on the ground, on her stomach, also looking up. Not just at the bricks that made up this edifice, that made this a replica of the tower they left behind, the one they had to return to now (now!), but at the windows lit up along the to
wer’s side. And at the girls who moved about within them.
By the time K rose, B and Q were beside her. All three edged back to the border of the pines.
“This is just like the Yard,” Q said, acknowledging the field of open grass that was all that separated them from the second tower they’d ever seen in their lives.
But K and B weren’t listening to her. And they didn’t take their eyes from those windows.
“Those…girls,” B said.
K didn’t know how to process it any more than B did. Had they gotten turned around? Was this their home?
“I don’t understand,” Q said. And simple as it was, the few words explained perfectly how they all felt.
No, K knew. This was not home.
It was hard to make sense of the short hair, the shirtless girls with flat chests, bony shoulders and necks.
“Look!” B said.
A large woman entered the glass hall on the first floor. Her stomach hung over her belt. Attached to that belt was a magnifying glass.
“She’s dressed like an Inspector.”
Only this one had hair on her face. And moved like no woman the girls had ever seen move.
She slouched like an ogre from Judith Nancy’s Odds and Ends, plodding along the glass hall.
“This isn’t good,” B said. “We have to go now. We have to go tell M.O.M. right now.”
“Hang on,” K said, still staring, unable to pull herself away. The disappointment at having left Film Night was erased entirely by the scene they beheld. The thrill of moving pictures eclipsed by a hidden reality, nonfiction, so close to their own.
“B?” K asked, still staring at the windows. At the huge Inspector lumbering on the other side of the glass.
But B knew no more than she did.
“I don’t feel good about this,” Q said. “At all.”
The big Inspector paused at a drinking fountain, bent at the waist to use it.
Through a window two floors up, K saw two naked backs in the light of a lit living room. Beyond them, a shirtless girl with short hair was talking. Above them, the next floor up, another girl with short hair passed by the glass, carrying a stack of books.
It looks just like ours, K thought. Down to the details. Yet it was nightmarishly unlike home. As if the Letter Girls had returned after all, having traveled in a circle that changed them.
Changed everything.
“We have to go,” B said again. “We just…right now, K.”
K turned quick on her sisters. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me we don’t tell M.O.M. Not yet.”
“What?” B asked.
“What are you talking about, K?” Q asked.
K didn’t know exactly. But what she felt, this overwhelming sense of having woken up to a second dream, wasn’t made up entirely of revulsion and fear.
There was interest there, too. Interest in this second reality. In the distortion of her own.
“I just wanna process this,” K said. “I just wanna think for one second before we run back and tell M.O.M. about something we know nothing about.”
B studied her sister. Her best friend. “You’re scaring me, K.”
“I’m sorry. Just…for me? For now?”
Q pointed to a high window. The girls inched back farther into the shadows of the trees.
A girl sat by her window up there. Elbows on the sill. Looking down into the Yard.
“Now,” B said.
“Hang on,” K said.
“Now.”
Then K felt two hands upon her shoulders as B and Q dragged her back into the pines.
Without speaking, they ran, using the light from the second Turret to guide them.
And when the light ran out, when they’d passed beyond its range, they used the moon, their new knowledge of the pines, ducking branches and sidestepping trees with more ease than they had on the way there. And when they saw the light of their own tower ahead, they understood clearly how much it looked like the light from the other. How similar it was, approaching their own. How the same. As if they’d come from that second tower, seeking to find the meaning of the object upon this one, a mystery K had drawn many times.
They hurried through the light, out onto the Yard, each of them experiencing a sense of nervous-calm for having returned. If they were caught now, they could either tell the Parenthood the truth or simply say they were out in the Yard, bored by the movie, wanted to breathe in the summer night sky. But none of them felt good about it. About any of it. And as they reached the back kitchen door where the staff put out the trash, and slipped back into the darkness of the kitchen, their thoughts remained harpooned to the frightening girls they’d seen in the woods.
The naked backs of the short-haired girls.
The hairy face of the Inspector.
The girl up high in the Turret window, looking out.
Passing through the kitchen, K felt tangled with too many emotions. She couldn’t name them. And while she was glad to have had B and Q with her, to verify what she’d seen in the woods, she also wished, in a way, that they hadn’t gone with her. That she didn’t have to worry about either one telling the Parenthood before she herself came to a conclusion about what it meant.
Stop it, she told herself, moving slow, not wanting to knock a tray of dishes. A cart of pans. You go in there and you tell your M.O.M. this instant!
But the inner voice wasn’t her own. Not entirely. Rather, it sounded like the Letter Girls sounded, all together, when M.O.M. was about to give a speech, when M.O.M. entered the Body Hall, pausing at the pillars to look up and down the pews, smiling proudly at her girls.
The voice in K’s head was her sisters. All of them. At once.
You will tell your M.O.M. this instant!
“Soon,” B said, meaning that the movie was ending soon. They’d made it in time.
The girls were huddled, shoulder to shoulder, by the kitchen doors. K looked through one of the circle windows. Saw the faces of her sisters in the pews, lit up by the much larger faces on the big screen.
Some smiled. Most were awed.
“I’m scared,” B said.
B. The funniest girl K knew. Scared.
Had they really discovered something so terrible? Oh, if what they’d done tonight were to change things, in any way…
“Try not to be,” K said. “If we just think about it for—”
But her voice was drowned out by the sudden cheer of the Letter Girls as the film came to an end.
“Now,” Q said.
The screen went dark in the Body Hall. K, B, and Q moved through the swinging doors. They slid into their pew, Q first, then K, then B, just as they’d been sitting when the movie began.
When the lights came on, M.O.M. was walking toward the podium, a proud smile on her face. The girls cheered and their voices echoed untamed off the high vaulted ceiling. K looked to B. She didn’t want to but she couldn’t not. Farther down the pew they saw Q sitting as she always did, her long brown hair obscuring most of her face again.
“Well, I hope you loved it as much I did,” M.O.M. said. Her voice full of magnanimity. “We’ll discuss it more at tomorrow’s Inspections. But for now…please head back to your rooms. Study. Relax. Or…” She looked directly at K. “Or draw.”
The girls in Voices began singing. The full overhead lights came on. The Letter Girls got up at once, chattering about the movie, quoting lines K, B, and Q would never hear for themselves.
And as they began to file out of the Body Hall, K saw the Letter Girls and the tower and all of her life flowing from the lips of one faucet into the open mouth of a drain. As if she’d turned something on she wouldn’t be able to turn off. And where would it go from here? Where did the water collect? Where might K find her old life again, the one where she laughed with her sisters on
Film Night and did not think about replica towers in the woods, where hairy women did not walk the halls like horrors from a Judith Nancy fantasy?
“Upstairs,” B said.
K looked her best friend in the eye. She saw some vestige of humor there. As if, for one moment, they could laugh about it.
But neither did.
Already, K thought, the bond between them felt different. And as they joined the outgoing flow of Letter Girls into the first-floor hall, K knew things would never be the same with B again. How could they be? After what they’d seen?
How could they?
Yet, as B followed close behind her, and as Q slumped her way out the doors ahead, K also knew she’d be going back. With or without B. With or without telling M.O.M. what they’d found.
She’d be going back to that Turret in the woods. Until she was satisfied that she knew where it had come from, who those girls were, and why she hadn’t known about them before.
Marilyn
The loft was a nice one, overlooking the river. The constant development on the Water Walk was the only drawback to an otherwise gorgeous view of lapping waves and boats…so many boats passing below, day and night, until Marilyn began to invent her own games by the clockwork horns blown below, truth and dare until it became only truth, her soul bared clean and unblemished by the passing of the boats.
She lived alone and she believed she liked it that way. Yet nagging thoughts of her close friends persisted: Most, if not all, had sunk below the surface of relationship mud. Most, if not all, were married. And while Marilyn made the rounds, visiting the closest of these friends as their schedules permitted, even holidays and birthdays were now hard to come by.
Why?
Why did it seem that everyone around her changed so much when paired with another? Take Evelyn, for example. Mean, strong Evelyn Tule. The woman was unrecognizable in her current state: near-housewife to the ridiculous Adam Horn. One day a lioness, the next all giggles and bad television. Is this what she wanted? Is that what she meant when she’d say, I’m no settler? What was worse, to Marilyn, was that she didn’t think she’d ever seen Evelyn Tule quite so…happy. As if the bliss of her marital status had cleaned her troubled consciousness of the cobwebs where the deeper thinking got stuck.
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