Spoiled. Spoiled rotten.
K had no illusions. If ever a Letter Girl was spoiled rotten, it was her.
The Corner. It had to be. That night. Which meant she had to endure her classes, dinner, study time, Yellow Ball with her sisters, a regular day in the Turret.
All while silently planning what she’d bring with her to the Corner.
The unfathomability of her desiring to go to that room of all rooms was not lost on her at all. Oh, how things had changed.
Was the Corner cold? She’d bring her winter coat. Was it dark? A flashlight. Would she die upon entering the room? Would she turn to ice, turn to ash, turn to stone?
She played poorly in her one game of Yellow Ball. Though she tried. Tried to look as though she was engaged. Hid from her sisters the fact that tonight she was going to the Corner.
Voluntarily.
And when night fell upon the tower, as the cold outside gripped the sculptures in the Yard, as one by one the Letter Girls fell asleep, K sat on the edge of her mattress in the dark of her bedroom, trying hard to resist the fear of that door in the basement. The painted letters rose so high in her mind that she could hardly imagine herself capable of turning the knob, pushing open the wood.
Entering.
She already wore a backpack full of her drawings. Drawings of the Letter Girls, the second tower, everything. Not because she feared the drawings would be found while she was gone, but because if she were to be caught, if she were to be declared unclean, she wanted her life’s work with her.
The backpack straps were comfortable on her shoulders. She hardly felt the light weight of the pages within. But she saw the drawings, her world, as if the pages were all suspended before her eyes.
The Parenthood mapped out. Detailed.
Revealed.
“Okay,” she said. “Remember when B said you can’t be brave unless you’re afraid of the thing you’re facing?” She closed her eyes, breathed deep, opened them again. “Go be brave.”
But by the time she was in the staff bathroom, it was as if she were lucid dreaming, willingly traveling through a nightmare. Her mind told her feet, Yes yes, advance, this is how we, yes yes, go. She knew she had to be aware of the things she always had to be aware of when she snuck out of her room. But this night was different. This night K was piqued to a level she couldn’t have fathomed prior to discovering the second tower in the pines, and even then, even then, she did not experience the depth of fear she felt now, opening the basement door in the false stall and closing it behind her.
She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to take the stairs down to the basement and willingly seek out the Corner. But that’s what her brain told her feet to do. And so they listened, as K’s eyes and ears floated above her body, seemingly disconnected, and mantras were the only thing to glue her sanity to her self.
This is right.
This is righteous.
This has to happen now.
B and Q were sleeping in their rooms high above her. Did either of them dream of the Corner? Did any Letter Girl dream of the rotting wooden door…the purple letters…the letters they’d all believed were written in blood? J’s blood? And if one of her sisters did dream, did they see K walking the cobblestoned hall, her legs like the noodles in the cafeteria soup? Could a dreaming sister see the fear emanating off twelve-year-old K as she rounded one hall, then another, her hands involuntarily reaching behind her as if she were trying to grasp on to the way back?
The lanterns did not flicker. The hum of the boiler did not rise and fall. Nothing moved in the shadows, and no doorknobs turned. No footsteps could be heard, and K wondered if the beating of her heart had done something to her head, had made it so she was incapable of experiencing anything but fear.
Her brain told her feet to move.
So they moved.
They moved again.
And they moved again.
Until K was standing a hall’s length from what must be the door to the Corner.
The purple letters were difficult to read, but she could see enough of them to know this was it. She had arrived.
Walk one hall. Twist one knob. Enter one room.
That’s all she had left to do.
She turned around. Then she turned around again so that she was facing it once more. She half-expected to find it partially open, as if whatever beast waited within had smelled her coming.
But the Corner door was closed. And when K’s brain told her feet to move, this time they did not.
She stayed in place but she did not remain still. Her knees shook, and for this her legs felt useless.
She didn’t have to do this. Not at all. She knew enough about the Parenthood and the second tower. She could turn right around, go back up, tell her sisters everything. She could put on her winter clothes and brave the freezing cold outside, hurry to the boys’ tower, wake up J, wake them all up, gather them together, tell them what she knew, tell them their entire lives were lies. With twenty-five girls and twenty-four boys, surely they could protect themselves, defend themselves, from…from…
K shook her head. Had it come to this? Was she now imagining the Letter Girls waging war with the Parenthood?
She turned and left the hall, flattened her back, and the backpack of drawings, to the stones of a new one. The Corner door was out of sight and K tried to pull herself together. This was too much. All of it. She should plan it out, whatever it was. She should go back to her room and sleep. Tomorrow she could find Q and B and talk to them and really figure out what they thought the next move should be. It was simply too big a task: pulling aside the veil alone, unearthing reality for all her sisters, all those boys in the pines, too.
Too much!
K slipped down the wall until she was sitting, then lying, on the floor. She cried.
And though she had many reasons to cry, she only cried now for how daunting the job really was. Why her? Why was she down in the basement when she should be resting, should be preparing what she’d say to her sisters? Why was she digging deeper when she’d already found so much buried in the dirt?
K cried for what felt like too long a time. Then she got up and, heart hammering, looked back the way she’d come. Wouldn’t be hard. Had to be a lot easier to walk back down that hall, turn, turn, take the stairs, leave, leave. Had to be a lot easier on her mind, her feet, her heart. How long would it take? Minutes. That’s all. Then in bed. Then juggling a manageable amount of anxiety. Not manageable. But still. This. This was blind panic. This was scarlet mad. This was—
K rounded the hall and ran. Ran for the Corner door.
She wanted to scream, to let it out, to shout at the door, to tell it she was going to open it, she was going in.
Instead, her lips pulled back as though taped to her ears, the whites of her eyes bright as the lanterns, K rushed in silence, even her boots making no sound, so little time spent touching the dirt floor.
When she reached the door, she used both hands to stop her forward momentum but slid into it, palms out, hands against the splintered wood, the faintly painted letters, the exact description of the Corner door she and her sisters had grown up with, had been raised to fear.
LIES!
The word shot through her head from a cannon, lighting up her mind’s sky with terrible colors as the door gave way under the power of her little hands and swung to, inward, the mouth of a sleeping man with a beard opening to release a nightmarish scream as he tossed and turned in his bed.
K stopped herself at the threshold, heard the long groaning creak of the hinges, as the door did not swing back, did not return to smack her in the hands, the face, the spirit. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, and from her pack she removed a flashlight, cutting the darkness down.
K saw something, didn’t know what it was, opened her mouth to scream.<
br />
But the face she saw before her was made up entirely of rolls of toilet paper on four shelves against the wall.
She shone the light on the door, on the letters. She read:
DON’T FORGET TO RESTOCK TP ALWAYS
Not the Corner. Not the Corner at all.
She grunted a sound she didn’t know she had it in her to make. The sound of defeat and relief sharing space. Confusion, too, and the distant suspicion that she had been fooled. She’d seen the words on the door from down the hall. She’d seen them!
Lies.
Stepping out of the supply closet, K closed the door and turned to face a new hall. She took it. Took another. Took another. The tip of a pen trying to solve a maze. A small marble rolling along the tracks of B’s inventive labyrinth, built for shop class, the fascination of every Letter Girl two springs past.
K kept silent and close to the walls. She traced the mortar between cobblestones with a fingertip, as if touching the solid surface would keep her grounded, keep her from turning to dust, to dirt, to be walked upon by the Parenthood staff come morning.
Then, having passed Judith Nancy’s office and the Glasgow Tunnel, numerous supply closets, the printing press, a room for sewing, and a room of old textbooks, she gave up.
She walked slower now, partly unafraid of getting caught. She was only a girl, after all, curious about the basement of the building she lived in. The underbelly of her world. And anyway, it wasn’t like she’d found the Corner or was inside the Corner or had to explain herself at all to anybody who might find her standing outside—
“The Corner,” she said out loud.
She was pointing at the door that made her say it.
At the end of an otherwise door-less hall, the sight of solid steel had caught her eye. Not because it was unmarked, though it was. And not because she felt something cold emanated from where it stood, though she did. If it was a door, it was the strangest door she’d ever seen, forming a solid right angle where two cobblestoned walls met, creating a tall metal—
“Corner,” she said again.
There was no knob.
K went to it this time without preamble. She put her shoulder against the right side and pushed. Both steel partitions moved; the one she’d pushed went in as the other came out, the corner of a hallway rotating, a revolving door like the one she’d read about in Judith Nancy’s Us Heroes.
K shone her light into the darkness. Concrete. Shelves. A drain.
She entered and the Corner door closed softly behind her.
If she was scared before, as she raced toward the supply closet so many hallways ago, she was positively changed now. Colder inside than out, K studied the concrete room. She heard a distant dripping and shone the light on the drain. Along one wall was a wood bench and along the other were shelves, upon which rested metal objects K had never seen before, never studied, never known.
She picked one up. It was clear which part was the handle, but K couldn’t be sure exactly what it did.
Ahead, an archway, indistinct, with flaking paint framing the passage, seemed to ask her to come on, come in. K set down the metal tool and entered a much larger room, where the walls were bare, the ceiling stone, and the floor, all of it, dirt.
A single marker in the far left corner and a single letter upon that marker caused her to speak, to say, No, to almost drop the flashlight to the floor.
J
She approached the marker, slow but shaking. She knelt in the dirt and touched the single letter, the name of her lost sister.
J in the Corner. This was the Corner. This was J.
Nothing in the dirt told her how wide the grave was, what space J took up, where exactly she was buried. K shone the light around the room, realizing for the first time how low the ceiling was, how cold the smell.
She cried and her tears landed in the dirt, making mud around the base of the simple wooden marker, no more than the size of a ruler.
J
Her end. Here. In the Corner.
Why? What had she done? What had she seen? What had the Parenthood discovered? Where had they caught her? In the pines? At the second tower?
Spoiled rotten.
Because she’d been taught to fear Vees her entire life, because she’d been raised to believe in Rotts, K covered her mouth with the neck of her black turtleneck.
But she knew better. She’d read the Burt Report. The papers in D.A.D.’s desk.
There was no Rotts. There was no Vees.
There was only the separation of the girls and the boys. And to learn of each other’s existence was to become spoiled.
Spoiled rotten.
K jammed her fingers, then her full hands, into the dirt. She dug, crying, her mouth forming a rectangle of anger, the face of rage. She pulled the dirt aside, thinking of the scene in Judith Nancy’s Us Heroes when Charlotte had to bury her sister after she’d died of Rotts.
“Die, Judith Nancy,” K said, hardly able to see her own hands through the wet wall of tears.
She dug and she dug until her elbows were level with the floor. She had a vision of Inspector Krantz examining those nails through a magnifying glass.
UNCLEAN
She didn’t care. She dug. She dug. She spoke gibberish, a train of words that, to her, made all the sense in the world. And the words were the only thing connecting her to her new reality, sanity, keeping her from flying away, from burying herself, too, here by J’s meek marker.
The Parenthood killed J.
M.O.M. ordered a Letter Girl dead.
She thought of the tool on the shelf in the other room and she understood it was a weapon.
K understood a lot. J was not spoiled. None of them were. None of them could be.
She brought her hands up and pounded down into the dirt, striking not a box like Charlotte used in Nancy’s story but a soft layer of clothing over something much harder than clothing. K pulled her hands quick out of the grave. She sat up straight. She shone the flashlight into the hole she’d made.
The hole the Parenthood made.
A once-black shirt? Hard to tell. It felt like one. Felt like the very one she was wearing.
K dug more, single-handed, lighting her way with the other, brushing the dirt away so fast that her fingers were a blur and the face (face) that emerged did so as if in a series of drawings, as if K had drawn J many times this way, over and over, a little less dirt upon her with each page.
She did not shriek when the sunken small head was fully revealed. The near-naked skull wrapped only in sandpaper flesh, the small teeth bared, the eyes but two smears of off-white in the large bone sockets.
K got up. She shone the light upon her dead sister’s face and she thought of how stupid she’d been, how stupid all the Letter Girls had been, to believe anything the Parenthood ever told them.
“I’m sorry, J,” K said. Sorry that she’d uncovered the truth too late.
Not only was the Corner not scary to her then, it was less than suitable: a drab, low-ceilinged, undecorated grave for a girl who didn’t belong here.
For a horrid moment, K wondered if it were possible to carry J out of here, in her backpack, up through the Turret, out to the Yard, to be buried in a place that received sunlight.
In the end, she covered J up again. Then she was out of the dirt room, past the shelf with the weapon she would not look at, and out the Corner door.
She moved fast through the halls, her spirit trembling with the horror she had seen in the dirt.
K ran a hand across her own face, not thinking about what the dirt might reveal upstairs, only needing to touch something alive, living, a breathing Letter Girl who might avenge her sister.
Past the supply closet she’d mistaken for the Corner. Past the entrance to the Glasgow Tunnel. At Judith Nancy’s door she spit. She
did not stop as she vomited on the floor, the wall, her shirt. She only nodded, thinking, yes yes, she could do this, yes yes, she could appear to be normal, yes yes, she could hide this from Krantz from Rivers from the Parenthood from M.O.M. for as long as it took to put together a plan.
Couldn’t she?
She reached the door to the stairs much faster than she had planned, and it scared her. Everything was moving too fast. Had she missed something? Had she missed the white vomit on her black shirt, the dirt under her nails, the tears in her eyes, the horror so obviously evident in her mind?
No, she’d accounted for it all and done nothing to remove it.
She opened the door and climbed quickly, pausing in the false stall because she heard voices out in the hall. So many voices. Too many voices. As if she’d spent the night in the basement. As if she’d lost track of all time as she knelt by her sister’s grave, as she dug up the body of a dead Letter Girl.
She shook her head no. No no. It was still night. Not yet morning. She hadn’t missed an Inspection, no no. Couldn’t be.
But the voices, the voices in the hall, all her sisters in the hall, the staff…M.O.M.?
They’re looking for you, she thought. And the last place they expect you to be is here, HERE, in the stall to the basement. Because nobody expects you to be spoiled, K. Nobody would ever think that you, of all girls, could ever be SPOILED ROTTEN.
No Nancy book had ever described madness the way K felt it now. She’d never been taught anything like this from Hjortsberg.
So, trembling, shaking her head, yes, you’re fine, you look fine, nobody will know, nobody will tell the difference, they know you, they love you, nobody suspects, K left the stall and, sick to her stomach, exited the staff bathroom.
The voices were coming from down by the Body Hall.
K followed them, wanting so badly to fit in. Wanting so badly to slip right into the crowd of Letter Girls as if she’d never set out through the pines, as if she’d never questioned the reality that had, for so long, kept her warm.
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