Breaking Free

The plans lay in Katherine’s hands like a deadweight. They showed twisting corridors, cozy alcoves, and concealed pathways leading to secret gardens with burbling fountains and hidden library rooms. She recognized them immediately - she had sat in the corridors of her old boarding school and imagined these magical worlds hidden under floorboards and across the trellises. Back then, her life was completely circumscribed by the walls of those buildings. The dormitories, the soccer fields and the classrooms were the limits of her existence, but she and her best friend had wanted and conjured up something more.

She and Justina had sat and imagined their own fantastical school building that, like Hogwarts, concealed hundreds of devices to help them evade the strict regulations that guided their every moment. Other girls snuck out windows for rendezvous with the boys in the sister school across the road. Katherine and Justina had found another way – as classic nerds, fantasy enthusiasts, as avid bookworms, they followed their imaginations.

She had not heard from Justina in over a decade. After high school, Katherine had gone on to attend a good college and diligently work her way up to a good job at a mid-tier consultant company in Washington, DC. Justina had been accepted to many of these same schools, but had put off a decision to attend college and had opted to take a gap year in Budapest. In that first year, her sporadic Facebook posts of ruin bars and pre-Soviet Austro-Hungarian glory were intriguing but not revealing of what her life was becoming there. The less and less frequent Skype calls told Katherine only scant details. The years passed and life flowed on, and Justina never returned to the US. Katherine’s work dramas, failed romances and family emergencies pulled her along and away from her best friend.

But today, Katherine had received these plans in the mail, with the wild fantasies of their adolescence somehow tamed into neat, regular blue squares and annotations, with layered drawings indicating floorplans and elevations, even a section on plumping and electrical layout describing the contraptions that would incredibly power the fountains and water features they had dreamed up together. Clever and intricate hydraulic structures powered the trap doors and rotating false walls. One such wall swung 360 degrees to uncover Katherine’s childhood pet project, her secret library complete with sunny reading alcove, tiny rose garden, and fairy statuettes carved out of marble.

She turned the envelope that the plans had arrived in over in her hands – there was no name anywhere, however the return address was in Budapest. Was this an invitation?

Her mind wandered back to Porterhead Academy, to her late-night adventures exploring the grounds with Justina. They had seemed an odd pair at first, with Katherine the straight-A high-anxiety over-achiever who cried whenever her report came back with an “A-“, and Justina the equally smart but more relaxed and artsy theater kid. But they had been assigned as roommates in 6^th grade, their first year at the school together, and in that time had found their shared love of fantasy. They passed books between each other, gushed about “A Little Princess” and screamed over “The Witches”, and giggled together across their dormitory room, snuggling and chortling in their cramped beds into the wee hours.

One night they tried to sneak down to the kitchen after an unsatisfying “Welsh Rarebit” dinner had been served in the dining hall. Justina had thought she saw a fairy light shining down one of the halls and scampered away from Katherine. Katherine yelped and followed after her as stealthily as she could. Justina rushed around a corner and disappeared into a gloomy room, which Katherine realized with great horror was a teachers’ lounge.

“Justina, please!” Katherine whined, her insides turning to ice at the thought of Ms. Reid, who lived in the dorms with them as a proctor, or worse, the headmistress, finding them out. “Please let’s go. Let’s go NOW.”

“Look at this!” Justina cooed, leaning over a glass box. She reached inside and pulled out a small fuzzy ball. “So cute!”

They had come across Mr. Hampton’s guinea pigs.

After that, encouraged by that miraculous first discovery, they began exploring their school after lights out several times a week, even as they passed puberty never fully relinquishing their childish hope of snooping out a ghost or a trapped djinn in one of the academy’s chambers.

While nothing lived up to the discovery of the little pets, the school offered much for two young women of such wild imaginations. The building and grounds had been large and immaculately kept, part of a large family estate and trust from railroad barons who had willed their home and money to the foundation of a school for the “edification and improvement of the Pennsylvania Community”. The centerpiece of the estate was a Japanese garden with a lilypond. Sitting on the oriental bridge over the pond, they would dip their toes into the glistening night water and whisper about their teachers, their crushes, and their plans to escape.

“I’m going to be on TV! In the movies!” Katherine remembered repeating to herself and Justina, over and over again. “I’m going to play Hermione, Galadreal, and Princess Ella.”

Justina had always been more skeptical. She sighed, “I just want to make something that the world appreciates. Like, we’re stuck here for now, but we can go anywhere afterwards, do anything at all. Ms. Reid said I have some talent for visual arts, maybe I can do, I don’t know, art installations or something.” She looked down and blushed. “I guess, maybe.”

At some point during their junior year, they began to dream up plans about what their perfect boarding school would look like. Justina sketched down their ideas into notebooks. They were never more than some crude floorplans, as Justina spared all her artistic relish for the sketches of stained glass windows, towering library shelves, antique globes, and tabby cats that they scattered around their imaginarium. Katherine drew up lists of her favorite books and authors for the library collection – Wordsworth, Tolkein, Rowling, Bronte, and Montgomery – on and on. They had tried and quickly abandoned the idea of making their own secret language, a la elvish, to hide their designs. It didn’t matter, the other students mostly eschewed them anyways, while the teachers looked on them with quiet but bemused indulgence.

Her cellphone buzzed in the midst of her musings – an email from her supervisor, marked as urgent (they all were). The team needed the final numbers and projections on the new case ASAP, and Katherine was lead. Her interns had produced the initial report, but they usually missed a few figures and needed careful revision and coaching. The time was 8:04pm on a Friday, but she knew the figures would be expected by midnight, or first thing tomorrow at the latest. “Well received” she tapped out on her iPhone, before folding up the mysterious plans and envelope carefully and placing them in a drawer. As she took out her laptop and brewed herself a K-cup, she decided that Sunday – usually the only day she could take for herself – she would take up the matter of the letter again. But now was time for work, the all-consuming beast that she both loved and feared. She applied lubricating eyedrops and donned her blue-light protection eyeglasses, but this did not prevent the numbers from squiggling and blurring in front of her while she juggled between the tabs of the excel spreadsheet and re-checked the formulas.

That Sunday, Katherine walked to the Meridian Hill Park, one of her favorite spots in the city and paced. A close inspection of the letter and the architectural plan had not revealed much more information except what she already knew – they were from Justina, or someone who knew Justina very well, and they were consummately done. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google were no help in learning more about her old friend. She could find no phone number associated with the return address, nor a name or organization. GoogleMaps showed a somewhat ordinary looking apartment building on a grey cobblestone street. Otherwise, all was a dead end.

The trees in the park were bare for the winter, but the park, surrounded by majestic luxury apartment buildings and town homes and commanding a view of the city, was no less impressive to her. DC was full of hidden treasures, completely ignored by the parade of bland, ambitious suits that marched through that town as if the world owed them something. Katherine had been one of these suits for many years now. Her cheeks still stung red when she remembered her first real networking event at a Massachussets Ave. think tank, where she had worn a snappy bright turquoise dress that, she thought, brought out the color of her eyes. Chaz, a university classmate who had gotten her the invite, turned and looked away from her when she approached. The tension in his body was palpable as she sat down beside him, yet he did not turn to acknowledge her, instead continuing his conversation with a man she recognized as a minor diplomat from the previous administration. Chaz was enthusiastically agreeing with this statesman. As she looked around, waiting for her chance to jump in, she noted the sea of navy, brown, black and beige. The women were down to a one dressed in pants suits with perfectly coiffed hair and tasteful, subtle accessories. Her purse was bright blue and bejeweled, to match her dress.

She stuck out that event, with a few strained words exchanged with Chaz, and walked out with her head high. But that weekend she spent several hours at Nordstrom Rack selecting a new wardrobe modeled against the women who had filled the room that day. To her, they were drab and aged by their attire, but they were among a certain cadre, who projected that they had made it, that they had the respect of their peers, especially their male peers. She visualized such a woman, with a smart black Calvin Klein suit and sensible heals, hair lacquered back into a professional swirl.

She would hold this woman in her mind for the next 10 years, and she saw that woman emerging day by day in front of her in the mirror. She climbed from unpaid intern at a marketing firm to project officer to lead consultant on special projects. On the way, she also discovered how blurry lines were in the real world – the neat borders on maps, perfect homogenized categories and declensions and species that she had learned in school were nothing but guideposts, and everyone colored outside the lines.

The most brutal revelation was when once, working late on a project, she had heard elevated angry voices from an office down the hall. She put in her headphones and continued to work on her presentation, but the voices rose and rose until she set down her work and went to explore. The voices became clearer as she approached her manager’s office door; it was a man and a woman engaged in a heated lovers’ quarrel. As Katherine watched, the door opened and the head of her department emerged, hair askew and lips and necked stained red. She did not know this man very well, but she was well aware that he managed her supervisor directly. She looked down quickly and paced back to her desk.

The next month, Katherine was turned down for a promotion and was encouraged to seek other opportunities.  After moving to her current consulting company, she would follow the progress of her supervisor from a distance over LinkedIn and through whispers over drinks with friends and office mates – the woman who had pushed her out had risen quickly in the company and soon secured the position of vice president of sales. She was not like the professional woman Katherine had drawn for herself in her mind – she was often sloppily dressed and emotional. But she had found her own way.

Lost in her memories, Katherine paused by the trellised fountain structure at the southern tip of the park and watched the water sparkle in the winter sun. She thought about what she had gotten out of this town – the status, the clothes, the slick friends and the trendy drinks. She had the right answers to give when she went home for Thanksgiving, when people asked what she was doing, and what were her plans. But she also thought about what the city asked of her, and all the little boxes she had pushed herself into. The fountain was beautiful, structured but chaotic at the same time. She sighed and looked out over the city, down 16^th Street, in the direction of the White House. The crisp smell of winter was in her nose, and her cheeks stung in the breeze. She loved this place. She hated this place. She made her decision.

The next day, she approached her supervisor about taking 3 weeks leave in January. Four years at the company and she had barely logged a sick day or extended weekend. He looked across his laptop at her and raised his eyebrows, and she had built up an impressive quota.

“There are some big project bids coming in January, particularly in the aviation industry – big money there. We could really use your input.”

Katherine felt like the young girl in the teachers’ lounge, afraid of getting caught, but as she looked down, she noticed her polished shoes, her tasteful suit, and her muted but expensive jewelry, and she remembered the woman she had been making herself into for the last ten years.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, Rob.”

He squinted and shook his head slightly. “I won’t stop you.”

On the flight, she delicately smoothed the plans on her tray table and pored over their contents. She traced the lines of her childhood and lost imagination, and studied the few handwritten signs for clues of her old companion.

“You might be making a huge mistake,” she whispered to herself. But she was smiling.