J sat on the couch. He couldn’t stand anymore. K took off her backpack. Set it on the carpet.
“You have to go,” he said. “They’ll send me to the Corner if they find you. They’ll send us both. We’ll get Vees, Placasores, Moldus…”
“Lies,” K said. “We won’t. I’ve been in your rooms many times. I’ve been in many rooms in your tower.”
J got up again. “You’ve been in here before?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not…right!”
“I watched you sleep. I went through your things, all the Alphabet Boys’ things. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I knocked on your window.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because I like the way you think. You think like me.”
J tilted his head, stunned momentarily silent. “Me?”
“Yeah. You.”
K went to him, knelt before him on the couch. “We have to tell everyone.”
“Why?”
“If everyone knows…then everyone’s spoiled rotten. They can’t send us all to the Corner…can they?”
J got up. Moved farther away from her. “I don’t want that for me. For any of the Alphabet Boys!”
“You think I do? But what are you going to do…now that you know what you know? Now that you read that book…now that you met me?”
J made to speak, but nothing he thought to say made sense. “Why did they hide us from each other?” he finally asked.
K went to him. “From what I read…it’s because we distract one another.”
“What does that mean?”
“When you should be studying…you’d be thinking of me instead.”
J hadn’t expected this answer. “Is that true?”
“Ever wonder how you came into being?”
“No,” J said. “We come from the Orchard. The Living Trees.”
“Ever seen one? Ever seen a new boy growing on a Living Tree?”
“No.”
K nodded. She didn’t hesitate when she took off her boots. Undid her pants. Took them off.
J could tell she’d planned this. But it was no less shocking for that.
“What are you doing?”
“Look,” K said. “Look.”
J looked. He couldn’t not. And what he saw scared him.
“Did they do this to you?”
“Who?”
“The Parenthood.”
“No. This is what a girl looks like. Yours”—she pointed—“and mine…that’s how we reproduce. No Living Trees, J. No Orchard.” She looked down at his penis. “Can I see that?”
J shook his head no. “You have to go. I can’t…this is…too much.”
But K’s expression didn’t change.
Before he could talk himself out of it, J pulled off his pajama bottoms. He stood quiet, blushing, before her.
“What do I look like to you?” he asked.
K stared. “Like a weird Letter Girl.”
They laughed briefly, insanely, and in that laughter J heard harsh angles.
Suddenly he felt some measure of the responsibility that had come with her through the window.
“Is this how we fail Inspections?” he asked.
“Yes,” K said. “I think they’ve been inspecting us to find out if we’ve met.”
J looked to the window, as if the glass had always separated him from reality.
“Listen,” she said. “It’s bad. It’s so bad. But we have to be strong. And we can do this. We can make sense of this. Think of it as an equation. Haven’t you ever thought something was too complicated for you to solve? And then you solved it?”
“Yes.”
“This is no different. We have to be smart right now. We have to plan.”
“How can you be so…composed?”
“I’m as scared as you are.”
She went to him.
She kissed him.
J felt his lips part, felt her teeth against his. Her tongue against his. It was a blur, a rushed confusion. When K pulled away she was not smiling. She only stared at his mouth. Then his body.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She kissed him again, then pulled away. “I once read a Nancy book where a girl was taken prisoner for ten years. She finally escaped, using lessons we’d seen her master.”
“Luxley had a book like that.”
He saw anger flare in K’s eyes. Color had returned to her cheeks. She moved her fingers freely. J felt his lips with his own hand. Thought of her lips against them.
“The thing is,” she said, “the girl in the story missed out on ten years of being with her sisters. And in those ten years her sisters changed a lot.”
“Sisters,” J repeated.
“And when she came back, when she saw them again, she didn’t relate anymore.”
“Sisters.”
“That’s happened to us, J.”
“But we’re not—”
“Something very important was stolen from us. We’ve been prisoners for twelve years. And you know what’s worse? We didn’t even know there was freedom to miss.”
J thought of Q. He wanted to wake him. Wake them all.
K took his hand. “Whatever they took, J, let’s take it back.”
J brought his mouth to hers. He wanted to taste her again, to smell her so close.
They kissed once more, now with confidence. After, K walked the hall to J’s bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
But J followed. And when he entered his bedroom he saw she was already lying down on his bed.
He felt like his body was bigger than his rooms. Bigger than the Turret.
He lay down beside her.
“You get it,” she said. “You’re not telling me to leave. You’re not calling D.A.D. You get it.” Then, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to go back home now or not. I don’t know what to do.”
“Stay a little longer,” J said. But he thought of her M.O.M. Would she be looking for her?
Would she come looking for her here?
J held her without thinking.
Then K cried for a very long time. J, overwhelmed by her body, her voice, her smell, her, imagined all she’d been through before arriving at his window. The cold. The fear. The knowledge that her friend might be in trouble.
Eventually her tears became broken sobs. Convulsions that shook her body until she fell still again. J cried, too. He trembled as he held her. Then K started speaking in what sounded, at first, like gibberish. Impossible plans.
“We can kill them,” she said. “Every one of them.”
The phrases were too big for J to process. And they came too fast.
There’s more of us than them.
We’re strong. We’re young. They’re old.
We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things. Before they make it harder for us to get to them.
We have to send M.O.M. to the Corner.
We have to send D.A.D. to the Corner.
We have to kill them.
Kill them all.
“K,” he said.
“What?”
“Stop.”
“No, J. This is really happening.”
She fell asleep in his arms. But J wondered how deep it could be.
It struck him then that he wanted to help her. Whatever it was she wanted to do. He wanted to help her.
He had to.
And with the thought came the first vestige of serenity he’d experienced since seeing her at his window.
He got up and went to the window. Below, Inspectors walked between the ice sculptures, checking the Yard for…
…for what?
J looked to the lip of the O
rchard. Mister Tree. The place K said she hadn’t been. But if not her…who?
“We can’t both fall asleep,” K said, almost as if she’d talked in her sleep. “We both have to make it to our…Inspections…”
J thought of her tears on him. Thought of them four times larger under the magnifying glasses of Inspectors Collins and Jeffrey.
“We’ll make it,” J said.
But they did both sleep. As J slunk back from the silhouettes of the Inspectors down in the Yard, as they studied what might have been prints, mostly covered by more fallen snow, as they signaled one another, as they brought their glasses to the cart, the room, the ladder.
J and K slept. As their worlds crumbled to dirt around them, as the dirt left marks upon their bodies, their minds, enough dirt to be declared unclean in any world.
They slept.
Together.
And J woke in the moonlight to see her still in his rooms.
K. Standing against the wall. Watching him.
J sat up fast. Was he dreaming? Had to be.
K stepped from the wall, a small stack of papers in her hands. She came to the bed and sat beside him. She didn’t speak. Not yet.
She set the pages between them. J saw they were drawings. He knew they’d come from her backpack. They looked like photos, as if K had taken pictures in and out of both towers. It was the first time J saw the inside of the girls’ Turret. And while it was similar to his own, there were differences.
The Letter Girls, for one.
So many drawings of other girls. Faces and hairstyles J had to remind himself were real. An Inspector without a beard. M.O.M.
With this last one, J felt cold. The large glasses obscured most of the woman’s face. The bones of that face were proud, strong, and her lips looked like they were made to say words like the Corner. Is this what D.A.D. looked like to K? Did he wield the same power? The same mystery? The same fear?
She showed him a picture of himself. It was a perfect portrait, as if the artist, K, knew him better than he did. His features, warm and sincere, emerged from a dark background, the black turtleneck that reached his chin. And despite K’s intent, J was embarrassed to look into his own brainwashed eyes.
She placed a drawing on top of it. A tunnel. A barrier splitting that tunnel in two.
“Meet me here,” she said. “Tomorrow night. After dark. The tunnel will be safer at night. The Turrets could be crawling with staff during the day.” She paused, considering. “And who knows what they’ve gotten B to say.”
But J had never been below before. The thought did more than scare him. It momentarily made him want to turn her in.
“Why the tunnel?”
“I’m going to tell the girls everything. Tomorrow. You’re going to tell the boys.”
“Me?”
“And we’ll meet when the sun goes down. And we’ll plan. And we’ll act on that plan.”
Before he could ask her how he was supposed to tell his brothers, when, and how to get to the tunnel, K produced more drawings that, by way of images, explained the way. The door, J saw, was in the staff bathroom. Stairs then. Halls. Doorways. The Corner?
A paper sign telling him where the tunnel was. Telling him that Richard was the only one allowed to use it.
“That’s your D.A.D.,” she said. “His real name.”
The letters looked impossible to J. Written by someone who made everything up and wanted everyone to believe it, too.
“Even his name,” he said.
J looked to his bedroom door. As if he could see all the Alphabet Boys there, as if he could see himself telling them.
More drawings then, pictures that elaborated on K’s vague plan. J had to turn away from some, couldn’t from others. Faces he had seen for the first time only minutes ago, now distorted with rage, pain, and horror.
J understood. All of it. He would go to his morning’s Inspection. Talk to the boys. Meet K in the tunnel.
Then…
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. He looked to a drawing of a Letter Girl carrying an ax through what looked like the hall outside his rooms. “I just don’t—”
“It doesn’t matter if you can,” K said. “You have to. And also…” She touched his face. “You can.”
Distorted by his own folded reality, kept sane by her presence, J touched her face back. They kissed. They ran their hands through each other’s hair. They cried.
K set the drawings aside, as if by this small ceremony, the plan had been agreed upon, the plan had already begun.
Tomorrow.
K crawled back into bed beside him and the two held one another beneath the blankets. Outside, winter had yet to relent. The world, it seemed, was frozen, all of the world, all of reality, except for the small warm space they made together, slowly, a red circumference expanding, melting away all the ice they’d found themselves in. Twelve years of frozen truth, finally, now emerging.
They kissed. They touched. They wanted to laugh, they knew they should be able to laugh, but neither did. The Turret was silent as K and J took the final hours of night to explore, to love, to heat. And while neither thought it wise to fall asleep, both did, stupefied by the feelings, despite the unfathomable danger that lurked. J did not wake until he heard that familiar word, that Turret rooster’s cry, three syllables cracking from the silver box in the hall outside his rooms.
“INSPECTION.”
He opened his eyes. Looked to his bed, saw K was gone.
In her stead was a note that read: Boats.
He got up quick, even as he heard the doors of his floor mates’ rooms opening and closing, even as he heard the command for the second and final time in the hall.
“INSPECTION!”
He went to his Boats board and touched the unmoving waters. Felt beneath the board and found K’s drawings taped there, in full.
No dream.
Wide awake now.
And, J realized, as he put on his pajamas, as he rushed for his living room door, as he entered the hall and the line outside the Check-Up room door, no time for a shower, either.
But even if he’d washed her from his body, would they find her on his mind?
M.O.M. and D.A.D.
And if they ever revolt? Marilyn asked, eyeing the first of the two towers deep in the northern Michigan woods. If they should ever all be spoiled rotten at once?
Richard shook his head no. You said yourself, if we raise them right…
But Marilyn’s expression didn’t change, and Richard knew this to mean her mind hadn’t, either.
The cabin, she said, nodding beyond the Orchard behind the first tower.
What of it?
A cavalry of cons, if you will.
Richard understood. Revolt was one thing; needing backup to keep that revolution down was another.
Marilyn went on. A stash of armed Inspectors. They might be on call for twenty years. And they might never be needed at all. We’ll pay them double. Who wouldn’t do it?
Oh, someone would do it, Richard said, grabbing the rake and beginning the arduous task of clearing the lawn of what they’d already decided would be the girls’ tower, but I just don’t think it’s necessary.
Fifty-two twenty-year-olds, Richard. Angry as hell. And by then…us, twenty years older. Our staff, too. One day we may be very grateful we secured protection from our own experiment.
Silence between them. Richard raked. Marilyn stepped to the sidewalk, then to the front door of what they hadn’t yet come to call the Turret.
Richard knew what she was doing. Where she was going. The inner office was already equipped well enough for work. Marilyn was going to make some phone calls. Set up some meetings. Late-night interviews with men and women who had reasons, perhaps, for dropping out of society, who might like to hide for two deca
des or more.
As was her way, always, she’d immediately put into practice what she’d preached.
Marilyn was on the phone.
Offering protection.
Hiring the same.
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.
Inspection Page 29