And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  Your secrets remain with the wind.

  THE TOWER PRINCESSES

  Everybody knows a tower princess.

  She might be the daughter of a friend of a friend. Or the girl next door who hides behind drawn blinds. Sometimes, she’s no more than an urban legend, like Bloody Mary, alive only when kids whisper about her late at night after their parents retire to bed.

  Tower princesses aren’t as exotic as they sound. They aren’t really royalty. They aren’t really anything. Just girls living in regular neighborhoods with mothers and fathers and a sibling or two. Plain as can be, or at least as plain as every other girl in the world.

  As plain as me.

  Except for the tower.

  ***

  I’m a senior in high school when the government hands down a special mandate in the princesses’ honor. Something about >expanding accessibility requirements in hopes of preventing isolation. The princesses are nothing if not isolated. Parents tip them sideways and hide them in basements and attics, because what else are you going to do with a girl in a nine-foot tower?

  Madeline’s Law, the government calls the new directive, named after a princess who hanged herself from her own turret after her family abandoned her in the backyard shed with a running hose and a bowl of Wonder Bread crusts.

  Nobody knows how she got the rope.

  Nobody cares either. The parents and administrators are more concerned about the princesses joining regular classrooms.

  “Why can’t they be homeschooled?” my mother asks in a town hall meeting. “I’m sure the girls would be happier that way.”

  Everyone with an opinion is certain they know what’s best for the tower princesses.

  ***

  A tower is like a fingerprint. Each one is slightly different. Different materials, different heights. Some are built of brass, others of mahogany, or redwood. The worst are barbed wire or rose thorns and cut the princesses if they move too fast or some bozo bumps into them in the hallway or lunch line. The school creates a strict policy about reinforcing the outsides of towers to render them harmless to passing students, but nobody’s too worried about what happens inside.

  Even the highest towers don’t look like towers. They’re more akin to moving coffins, birdcages with solid walls instead of thin copper bars, never taller than a dozen feet and just wide enough for the princesses to stand, perfectly postured at all times.

  At night, while my parents and brother snore in the next rooms, I curl in my bed, knees tucked into my chest, and wonder how the princesses sleep.

  ***

  By the end of September, seven tower princesses enroll at our school. Their first day, the teachers don’t ask them to introduce themselves.

  “Best to ignore them,” they say. “The sooner they realize this isn’t where they belong, the better.”

  But I can’t ignore them. At least not the girl in my grade. She’s different than the others. Her scent reminds me of an orchid in bloom. We share almost every class, and whenever she’s nearby, my head spins, and my bones turn liquid, like mercury flowing freeform inside me.

  At five-and-a-half feet, her tower is shorter than the rest, but it’s strong. Made of titanium, I hear the teachers whisper. Smooth and polished, the color of simmering charcoal. She bumps into me in the hall after geometry, and the cold metal against my skin is like a shock of blue electricity. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but I jump back on instinct, and a mountain of math and social studies textbooks spills from my arms.

  “Pardon me,” says a voice, tinny and distant, inside the tower.

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  A guy at the next locker groans. “One of them touched you. You’re infected now.”

  He says it loud enough for the girl in titanium to hear as she shuffles to her next class.

  “Leave her alone,” I mutter.

  I hate the boys. Out in the open, they taunt the princesses, but anytime they think no one’s looking, they paw at the towers like rabid wolves. That’s how I see them—with glistening fangs and a steady stream of drool dripping down their chins. They’re always circling their prey, searching for weaknesses.

  The boys are dangerous, though the teachers never listen when I speak up.

  “Those young men come from good families,” they say, as if blue blood lineage precludes bad behavior.

  After school, the boys gather out front to watch and catcall the girls, so I shortcut out the back, past Carol’s 24-Hour Diner where the waitresses wear funny pink hats, and down the alley behind Joe’s Butcher Shop.

  Nobody sees me. I’m in an invisible tower, one that shuts me off from the world. I could wander for hours. Provided my chores are done, my family never notices I’m missing.

  At the city limits, I trudge among a scrawny forest. Most of the trees were trimmed years ago to make way for power lines and sewage grates, but a few willows, emerald and withering, survived. I settle in the dirt and scribble messages in my notebook to the wind and the rain.

  How are you? Where do you come from? Where do you go?

  With a careful hand, I tuck the letter in the carved hollow of the tallest tree.

  This becomes my new favorite thing. Slinking out the back door at school and coming here. Especially since each time I return, my message is gone.

  I tell myself the wind swallows the paper, or a mama bird stuffs my handwriting in her nest as fodder.

  That’s the lie I believe.

  Until the day I get a note back.

  ***

  The girls aren’t born in towers. The towers show up later, typically around fifth or sixth grade. Not much can predict which girl will get a tower and which won’t. People with clipboards and fancy diplomas slanted on walls are always trying to pinpoint it, inspecting the data for correlations in socioeconomic status or mental health, but it’s all spurious, and nothing in the research pops.

  A normal girl, a weird girl, a rich girl, a poor girl. Anybody’s fair game for a tower.

  So long as you’re a girl.

  ***

  Each day, in the cafeteria, the princesses cluster in small groups, and an aide feeds them through the narrow slit in their walls. Each tower has one gap near the top, a window for nourishment and waste removal, and all the boys guffaw and makes jokes about what they’d do with that opening if given the chance.

  “I’d make those girls scream my name,” my brother Sam says, and kicks up his dirty feet on the kitchen table.

  Sam’s feet are always dirty. Dirty as his mind, I say.

  I keep my head down at the sink and clean our dishes from dinner. My brother doesn’t do dishes. Our mother says it’s my job.

  Sam leans closer to me, his chair balanced on one leg, and pinches my waist.

  I yip.

  “Admit it, Mary,” he says. “You fantasize about getting your fingers up inside one of them, don’t you?”

  Our mother, laundry basket in tow, peeks around the corner. “What was that I heard about fingers and towers?”

  “Nothing,” Sam says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  After I finish at the sink, I creep to my room and reread the message from the willow. It’s written on green paper in the most beautiful calligraphy I’ve ever seen.

  Hello. How are you?

  I smile and memorize every curve of the handwriting. By the end of the evening, I’ve folded and unfolded the note so many times it disintegrates between my fingers.

  ***

  The school initially plans a special classroom for the tower princesses, with peaked ceilings and broad doors and an entrance at the far end of the building where they can’t bother the rest of us. But then a federal inspector comes and nixes that idea, saying no, no, no, nothing to segregate them. The law, he reminds the principal, dictates the girls must mix with the other students.

  This is not welcome news. In their monthly newsletter, the teachers claim in vehement and colorful terms that the tower princesses pose an exceptional health risk to others.
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  These girls lack any discernible coordination, and given their towers’ colossal weight and size, they could crush your son or daughter in an integrated classroom!

  Bold print doesn’t lie, my mother always says when she reads their latest drivel. And it is true the girls have a problem with balance. Hard to be graceful when you can’t properly stretch your legs. A few princesses have sawed small holes in the bottoms of their towers, so they can wiggle their feet through and walk on their own, but even then, they’re top heavy and have a tendency to tip.

  Crushed! Your son or daughter will be CRUSHED!

  The other girls need constant transportation, in the form of electronic platforms, which are basically scooters, only wid-er and with less color options.

  Should your taxpayer dollars go to supporting the transport of someone who is a hazard to your child’s health? We surely don’t think so!

  During French IV, I’m seated near the girl in the titanium tower. As always, she makes my skin buzz.

  “Up late?” she whispers, but I pretend not to hear her.

  She’s right though. Last night, I fell asleep at the willow, hopeful I’d discover the person leaving me notes. No luck.

  The teacher passes out an exam, and I hunch over the blank spaces where my English translations should go.

  Souhaiter. Vouloir. Adorer.

  I don’t know any of these terms. This is a failing grade. I’m seventeen and can’t pass a basic vocab quiz.

  My cheeks burn, and I clench my jaw to hold back tears. Next to me, the princess is watching. I can feel her gaze sear through me like wildfire. I’m curious what she sees.

  She lurches within her tower—maybe because she’s restless, maybe to get my attention—and the tips of her turrets crack the classroom wall. The pipes inside fracture, and sewage spurts onto our desks.

  And even sitting still, these girls are a distraction, and let’s face it: they rarely sit still.

  We’re immediately evacuated for the day. Biohazard, the teacher says. Later, when I’m studying for the retake exam, I almost wonder if the girl did it on purpose.

  To save me.

  ***

  Cutting open a tower to extract a princess sounds like a reasonable solution, and sometimes, well-meaning parents give it a try, but it never takes. The tower always grows back. The towers are alive and feral and don’t easily surrender what is theirs.

  So we leave the girls as they are, prisoners in plain sight.

  “It’s safer this way,” the adults say. “Nobody can hurt them if they’re all locked up.”

  I think of this, the shelter of a tower, the day a group of senior boys knock me down in the alley behind Joe’s Butcher Shop and tear the buttons off my silk blouse. I’m headed to my willow tree, another note written and tucked in my pocket.

  I don’t make it to the forest. Not today.

  These boys with football muscles and laughs like retching hyenas remove their cell phones and record what they do to me, the kicking and spitting and roving hands, their fingertips pressing into my flesh as though I’m made of pudding. They want all of me, a body not swathed in a tower but free and open for the taking, and they want to hear me scream and beg them to stop.

  But what they don’t know is I can kick and spit and use my hands too. I scratch the biggest of the boys, the leader, because I hope if he falls, the others might follow. I go for his eyes, and he thrashes and whines and falls to his knees, screaming for his mother.

  Boys are apparently more delicate than they look. Maybe they’d do better if they could hide in towers too.

  The ambulance arrives like a wailing banshee, and though I’m clutching the tattered remains of my clothes across my claw-marked breasts, the paramedics service the injured boy first, spiriting him to the hospital where he stays for a week. His parents try to bill my parents for the care, but since one of the boys was fool enough to put the back alley escapade on YouTube, we don’t pay a single penny.

  But the case never gets to court. Everyone says that’s for the best, that I would never have held up on the stand, not when a brigade of Armani-suited Ivy League lawyers were out for my flesh. Besides, the cops remind me, the boys didn’t really have me, didn’t make me bleed, not from the place that counts, so the incident goes down as a simple prank taken too far.

  At home, my parents banish me to my bedroom, my father gritting his teeth and my mother sobbing.

  “Why were you walking that way alone?” they ask again and again. “Why do you always cause us problems?”

  I have no answer for them, so I stare at my shoes and wish I was someone else.

  After they’ve gone to bed, I climb through my window and head to the forest, keeping clear of the butcher shop.

  A note is waiting in the willow.

  I heard what happened. Are you okay?

  No is all I write back.

  I don’t go home. Instead, I nestle in the cool earth and dream about those towers and those princesses and how nobody hurts them. How they’re safe.

  Safer than me anyhow.

  ***

  When a tower grows around a princess, it happens overnight. One day, the girls are running and laughing and splashing in summer sprinklers, their bare feet slick against the grass. Then—bam! They awaken to find themselves locked up in a cage that moves, for good and all.

  Because everybody knows once you’re a tower princess, you never go back.

  ***

  Things at school are worse than before. Things are always worse for girls who fight back.

  Nobody trusts me now, not the teachers or the other students or even my own parents.

  “You couldn’t have humiliated Mom and Dad more if you’d birthed a tower,” Sam says, chuckling.

  In spite of the video, plenty of people claim I set up the whole thing.

  “She’s so desperate for attention,” the girls with blond ponytails and pretty pink cheeks say. “Like any guy would want her.”

  Between classes, I duck outside to the chain link fence where the smokers hang. I’ve never had a cigarette in my life, but today, it’s quiet here. And empty, except for the girl in the titanium tower.

  “Hey, you,” she says, and the white rays of the sun shine through the slit in the tower, revealing two eyes, green as a dew-draped meadow.

  “Hey, me, what?” I say because I can’t think of anything clever.

  “I’m Linnea,” she says. “You’re Mary, right?”

  She watches me as if I’m glass, and she can see inside me.

  I wish I could see inside her too.

  I shrug. “Yeah, I’m Mary. So what?”

  “Could you do me a favor, Mary?”

  I shouldn’t do favors, especially favors for tower princesses. But Linnea’s different. So I sneak a Pall Mall out of my mom’s purse, and the next day, between fifth and sixth period, I light the end and fit it through the gap in the tower.

  “Thank you, Mary.” Linnea puffs out gray circles, and the tower looks like it’s burning. “Want to share?”

  I roll my eyes. “Whatever.”

  “Come here,” she says, and I move close to her, so close the chill of the metal prickles my skin.

  Our faces align through the tower. She leans forward and presses her lips to mine.

  The smoke snakes down my throat, and I inhale. Everything turns sweet like caramel crystallizing on my tongue.

  Linnea pulls away to catch her breath. Then she giggles and does it again. There’s no smoke this time. Just a long, aching kiss.

  When the bell rings, I sleepwalk to class, my life cleaved in two—before this moment, and after. And I can only think one thing.

  I want more.

  ***

  After school, I leave another note at the willow. It’s short, but it’s my favorite message so far.

  I met someone. She’s beautiful.

  I laugh, because how do I know if Linnea’s beautiful? I’ve never seen her whole face at once. She’s a mosaic, and I have to cobble
together the pieces.

  We meet at the chain link fence every day. She stops requesting cigarettes. She doesn’t need an excuse to kiss me now.

  “Have you ever done this before?” she asks.

  I feel my cheeks flush. “Why does it matter?”

  Her lips curl into a grin. “So you’re almost eighteen, and I’m your first?”

  “Don’t make fun,” I say.

  She kisses me again, softer and sweeter this time.

  Am I your first? I want to ask. But I don’t. If she has kissed someone else, I’ll drive myself crazy with the details—the who and the when and the where.

  Better to focus on right now. Me and her. In the moments between, the moments without her, I’m holding my breath and waiting.

  We’re only safe when we’re together.

  ***

  The school reports in December how the tower princesses are making good progress, but it’s a lie. The boys still cajole them, and the teachers invent every excuse to exclude them.

  “They can’t toss a basketball or lob a volleyball, so what’s the point of them taking gym?” the PE instructor says. “Send them to study hall instead.”

  So I’m far from Linnea when the blond ponytailed girls shove me down in the shower after class. I strike my head on the mildewed tile, and they spit on me while I bleed.

  It takes an hour for maintenance to discover me, and by then, my fingers are pruning and my skin’s chapped raw beneath the heavy water the girls left to run after they skittered off to biology and algebra.

  At the emergency room, the doctors poke and prod me.

  “A week of bed rest,” they say, and I know what that means.

  No walks to the willow. No chain link fence between classes. And no Linnea.

  I recline in bed for seven days and wish I was like her. I wish I was in a tower, so no one—not my parents or my brother or the mocking boys and girls—could ever put their hands on me again.

  I envy the princesses. And I hate them a little too.

  Except Linnea.

  I could never hate her.

  ***

  When a princess dies, her family buries her in the tower. It’s convenient, for sure, but there’s no other choice. Upon her final breath, the tower calcifies around her.