What if the album folklore inspired a novel?

It's been my dream since I started TikTok, now I'm (FINALLY!) putting it here. I submit to you, on this tiktokless day, the entirety of chapter one: seven.

“Are there still beautiful things?”

Lush greens painted the expanse of Forest Park on an unusually temperate summer day in St. Louis. Magnolias, oaks, and birches covered the acres, planted so abundantly that they created their own skyline, blocking out the progressing skyscrapers rising on either end of the park. These trees knew the splendor of the turn of the century in that great World’s Fair 30 years prior, and they now looked down upon a wild expanse, made all the wilder by the two little girls who climbed and romped, played adventurers and shrieked with delight every muggy day that summer of 1932.

Veiny shocks of leaves shook on the tallest tree in the park, an old hickory planted prior to and surviving through much of the Gateway to the West’s history thus far. This tree had known St. Louis through the tumult of wars, the ruckus of train engines first coming through stations, and the many footsteps of those brave enough to venture further out to California and the mountains. Now, just as importantly, it held two seven-year-old girls on their final day of the hazy months of summer.

Inez, lithe and lanky, looked down branches below, where her close friend Betty Bowery was being suspiciously quiet. She squinted through the covering, trying to locate her friend who had made a surprising promise today to face her fear of heights. Her hands gripping the rough bark of the tree, Inez reached down and jammed her left knee into a jag in the bark and swung under the layer of green that hid her friend. As she swung, the satisfying swish of the old tree’s leaves gently brushed past her braids, her hair meticulously woven and tied back with ribbon that morning by her mother.

The bond of imagination, of creating new worlds was the invisible string that had kept Betty and Inez as close as they were. When businesses in this town, like many others in the United States at the time, began shuttering their window and as the grownups became worried, Betty and Inez stayed blissfully unaware as often as possible, preferring the world they made to the one they had to live in at home.

Forest Park was already full of worlds and memories, haunted and holy by the fairytales the girls had already heard from their own mothers. Borrowed nostalgia with a fresh look was a perfect canvas for the quick, confident storytelling of two little girls. Today was their last day together for the summer. The next week was the start of school for Inez, and as the girls were from opposite sides of the park, the schools and circles they ran in were very different most of the year. This final romp was to be their best of all, if only Inez could get Betty to look up instead of down at the very hard ground below. Short, pitched breaths rattled, and Inez knew Betty would need distraction to keep going.

“Remember what my mama says?” Inez shouted forcefully down to a still unseen Betty Bowery. Petite and with long, waving blonde hair, Betty was usually easy to spot as a bright white spot amidst the deeper brown and green hues of their summer playground. Inez, not hearing a response, thus struck out to venture lower in the tree, when she heard a decisive thwack! down below, and shuffling indicating Betty was again trying to climb.

“She says the taller the tree, the better the view…” a wobbly voice floated up.

“And?”

“And the closer to the sky, the better blue.”

“Exactly. Now am I going to have to tell my mama that you are questioning her?”

Inez’s mother, Marjorie Augustine, was both girls’ hero. She was the starting off point for Inez’s imagination and even for grown-up women a bit of a myth of what a woman could do. In 1904, while Betty’s mother was being shown around the Fair to visiting royalty and high society for the marriage market, Inez’s mother was participating at the Junior Olympic Games, which allowed girls from far and wide to be taught archery by the female Olympians, and then to compete themselves. Marjorie had remained an adventurer and always insisted that girls must play as hard as boys do out in the world, and Inez, who was as rambunctious and rowdy as her brother, was proof of that belief carried out.

Today, she was the one who had sent them off with the picnic presently strewn under the shade below, a basket full of foods wrapped up in a blue checkered blanket. Jars of sweet tea turned warm, ham and cheese sandwiches wrapped in cloth, a jar of fresh pickles, and slices of apples with peanut butter had all been jammed into the basket, with well wishes on their adventures from Mrs. Augustine.

The girls had put their fuel to good use and had spent much of their final day making promises, as little girls are wont to do. If Inez was the motor of their operation, Betty was the quiet map maker. Betty’s mother, though less known to Inez due to the strict rules put in place by Mr. Bowery, was known through her daughter’s inherited love of painting. Very occasionally, Betty Bowery would talk about time spent with her mother, speaking of days on the beaches down south on the Lake of the Ozarks, or of shared quiet moments baking her father’s birthday cake. For a girl with such a detailed mind, though, there were always parts that seemed oddly blank or, more likely, purposefully obscured.

Betty’s paints and two small canvases set against the tree, drying under the summer sun. It had been Betty’s idea to make something for both of the girls to keep, to have to look at during the long months of school and separation, to remember the adventures they had and to look forward to the ones they would have again. The canvases were filled with this summer’s inventions: pirates with a chest of gold doubloons, stars with planets drawn all around, bits taken from Betty’s father’s travel post cards that had helped them imagine visiting the Taj Mahal, or an olden love story in ancient Rome. In a way, it was both canvases were a postcard of all the places the two girls had been to together over the past three months, a reflection of the lands they had invented.

And today, for their grand finale, they would make it to the top of this tree.

“I don’t know if I can do this Inez. I’m not like you. I’m not.”

“You’re not like me because you haven’t gotten up here yet, but once you do, you are like me. What’s in your head right now? Tell me what you imagine.”

When two little girls play together as Betty and Inez did that summer, they come to know the edges of each other’s imagination, of what stories are easy to grab at and what take more time. Inez and Betty, then, were not only aware of each other’s dreams, but of one another’s biggest fears, especially the ones that only came out as the dragon or evil witch in one of their invented fairytales.

“What if I fall? What if I hit my head? What if a squirrel drops down on me and makes me yell and hit every branch on the way down?” Betty’s voice was quiet, high pitched, and nearly undone.

Inez wouldn’t accept a victory if she reached it alone, and so she quickly scaled all the way down to her friend, finding her looking straight into the trunk of the tree, one tear threatening to cascade down.

Betty’s fear of heights was a well-established limit on what kind of adventuring they could handle, a limit Inez usually didn’t push her on, in the same way Betty didn’t push Inez to be to the park before 9 am, given her own proclivity to sleep well through multiple wake up calls. It was quite unusual, then, that this morning while painting, Betty had reached out to grab a brush, squinted at her half-completed picture, and then stated they would both climb the tallest tree in the park today. Enthusiastic to do one great thing together on this last day of summer, Inez thought it wise not to question too much. She was very familiar with the fact that questioning too much could make Betty close off, and whatever had inspired this sudden plan could change just as suddenly.

As she looked closer at her terrified friend, she now saw that her usual fuzzy blue cardigan had slipped from where it had prior been knotted and fallen to her waist, exposing her skinny arms embracing the tree. Inez felt her own grip slip as she saw the black and blue marks pressed into and around Betty’s shoulders, running down her bicep. Ten penny-sized marks in total, all blooming out in purple and fading to yellow, like flowers bursting in a summer morning. Betty followed her gaze and saw Inez take in what very tangible marks like this might mean.

“Did that happen today? Did you fall?” Inez was smart, and she was also just a little girl who sought to hold onto naivety where she could. She offered Betty a way out with a different type of pretend story, if Betty wanted it.

Betty and Inez had a rule in their pretend play, and like any rule in childhood games, it became sacred and pervasive. In their made-up worlds, they were not allowed to see anything as it was, but rather as it would be interpreted in their dreamland. A leftover bag of trash was not garbage, but rather a treacherous trunk full of weapons their enemies were out to trick them with. A tall building was not a park ranger’s lookout, but rather the castle they were both to live in once their princes arrived. Inez, then, knew she could not ask Betty about her real bruises, unless she could figure out a way transform them into their story.

Betty’s eyes traveled from her bruises back up the trunk and finally to Inez, her anxiety of heights gone, and a different, quieter fear present instead. Her brow furrowed, wrinkling the freckles smattered across the bridge of her nose, and when a first tear fell, a second quickly took up its place. It was all that needed to be expressed between the two girls, even for a child to understand. This version of Betty would be a face Inez would never forget, and up high in the hickory tree, a new, darker type of imagination began to take root in Inez’s understanding of what terrors might be out in the real world.

Perhaps one of the curses of childhood is to acutely sense when something is wrong, but not have the words to be able to explain it. The girls’ days were often filled to the brim with stories meant to make sense of what they had heard or guessed at based stories snatched from the stairway at home. When Inez could not make sense of the line of folks at the soup kitchen in her neighborhood, it became wrapped into a story of a magician who could make a tremendous amount of very delicious food at any one time. Around the many apothecary bottles kept by Betty’s mother, all lined up precipitously on the edge of the claw foot bathtub at home, developed a folklore of herbs and potions. The girls had a habit of pulling their real lives into stories, and if Inez wanted to help her friend, she had to figure out how to do that now.

Suddenly, it become much more important that Betty climb this tree. Inez wondered at Betty’s father, assuming it must have been he who could have gotten so upset as to mark her. Inez herself was unable to imagine a father as anything but kind, her father the adoring, joking, silly man that he was. She imagined, automatically, Betty’s cold, rigid father. She had only been to their home a couple times, but each time she had the sense of walking on glass, of the tight way her father walked, and the way her mother spoke in hushed, flinching tones.

She looked at her good friend and, despite her own horror, knew that what Betty needed in this moment was not inquiry nor dread, but hope. And she needed to know she could climb this tree, that she could still make her way, and that Inez wouldn’t see her any differently for what she had been made to endure.

“It seems, captain Bowery, that the dread pirates quite put you through it! It’s a good thing they did not know the brave piratess they were dealing with. How did you manage it? How did you overthrow that evil captain from the ship and sail to safety?”

Betty was grateful for her friend, for knowing, as always, where was safe to go and where she might need help. How could she explain it? How could she tell her friend what she didn’t understand, as Betty was still reeling from her bruises as well?

She stayed quiet, and took a deep breath, stating, “It was not easy. It was very scary.” Her imagination was failing her, frayed by the reminder on her own flesh of a reality that was difficult to escape, even in dreamland.

Inez felt her friend struggling, pulling back and in even more, and she knew now was the time to offer the door out of real life and into a better, safer place.

“I think that house of yours is haunted, isn’t that so? Isn’t that why your dad is always mad? I suspect he sent you to the pirates to hunt ghosts, so that things could be better.”

Betty’s face changed nearly imperceptibly, her eyes widening for only a second. She seemed far away suddenly, somehow. It seemed talking about it had not landed, and now Inez felt her own panic rise. She had to get them moving—moving was always the thing that made Inez feel better.

“Let’s climb to the top of this tall ship, and we can look out onto the massive seas to find our next direction towards treasure. We will certainly not let any other ship capture us again! A rival captain will never have us fall again!”

Betty looked up at Inez and knew that a type of kindness she didn’t quite know existed was being given to her, and this emboldened her. She reached a hand up and placed it on the branch between them, pushing up into her shoulders, feeling the stretch and sting of the bruises on her arms.

“Well, Captain August, you better move up the rung or we shall never make it up and out of the coming tides in time!”

Inez smiled at her friend, huffed, and both girls began scaling through the web of branches and up towards the top of the height.

“How are your sea legs, captain? Alright to make it up to the top of flag?”

Betty pulled up to the same level as Inez, and grinned at her.

“Aye, cap’n. I think I might even make it before you!”

The two girls giggled and clambered up the tree, Betty with more confidence than she had felt in quite some time, and certainly the most confidence she had ever felt this high in the air. Inez let her gain some distance on her, puffing and grunting as the bark gripped her palms, splinters leaving marks she knew would last through until next summer. As she neared the top of the tree, she could see Betty’s foot press off the final branch and knew she was above the tree line, looking out into the old park, the flow of the creek below, the imposing grandeur of the buildings that had remained from the Fair, as well as land pockmarked by the temporary city made of straw and clay that had lasted only one summer. The park lay under them like a tapestry of old and new, invigorating and somehow captured in the taking sight of it all.

Inez carefully found her way to the other side of the peak, and pulled herself to Betty, above the leaves, both girls hugging the top branches, breathing hard, quiet.

Inez reached out, placing her hand on Betty’s bruises, acknowledging it. Betty’s cardigan remained tied over her shoulders, and she did not flinch at the touch.

Betty didn’t say anything to her friend, but unknotted the worn cardigan and held it in her hands. She balled it up, covering it in grass stains, and threw it out into the wind, letting it float down far below. The wind picked it up, slashing it through branches until is dropping it into the rushing water. Then Betty Bowery did something she does not do: she screamed, ferociously, out into the sky, her voice taken up by the wind, agitating a nearby flock of birds out of their nests. She let her voice ring out, painful and clanging, and Inez got the sense that Betty contained such feelings that was hard for a little girl to understand, and possibly sentiments a little girl would never want to understand.

Things settled, as they always do. Betty quieted down, a few more tears drying up now, and then seemed to be focused on deep breathes, holding tighter to the tree as she came back into herself.

“I did always wonder why you wore that every day, even when it was as hot as sin. The cardigan, I mean.”

“I really was just cold sometimes. These are worse than any I’ve had before. She—He doesn’t mean to do it, and I know that. I don’t know if that makes it better. My dad just gets scared, and sometimes confused when he’s tired or taken too much medication or too many drinks. I don’t think this time he even knew it was me, he just grabbed me as if I was the something that scared him.”

Inez wasn’t clear how much to believe her beloved friend. She worried, but she knew that for now, she was learning more than she ever had been let into about the blank spaces in Betty’s life.

“You know you could always come stay with me, if you ever get scared. It isn’t much, but I have that little closet between me and my brother’s room, and we could give you my purple sleeping bag. You know how much my mom and dad love you. We could even go to school together.”

“Please don’t tell them, especially your mom. No one is supposed to know, and I promise it looks worse than it is. I promise that. But you need to promise me you won’t tell anyone, even your mom, because I could get in big, big trouble.”

“I promise, Betty. Cross my heart, won’t tell another soul. But you also must promise me if it does happen again, you’ll tell me so we can tell my mom. Pinky promise?”

The two girls grabbed hands and looked out at the sunset illuminating the park. They pointed out all the places of their adventures over the past few months, and all the places there were still to explore. For a little while, Betty’s burdens felt lighter for being shared. The sky beamed pink and lavender as the sun crested red on the low horizon, two little girls in the trees watching a season end.

“Sometimes it feels like our parents used up all the life to live in this park, that all we will get is the hand-me-downs. I wanted to climb this tree because I wanted to see it differently, you know? I wanted to know if there were still beautiful things, or if all that had gone. Sometimes it feels like that.”

Inez wondered at her, then said, “I don’t think places like these get used up or worn down. I think they get loved and the love makes them even more beautiful, deeper maybe. My mama’s adventures get passed down to me, like folk songs, and the old love last so long. Something like that…my Mama says it better.”

In her own way, Inez was trying to tell Betty what her own mama had taught her. The love will be remembered, the love will be what lasts, tucked into pockets, baked into bread made from old recipes years from now, passed down in imprecise stories of adventures years prior. It was not easy, and it was not the only option of making sense of pain alongside love, but it was a choice. It was always, always an available choice. It had to be.

The sun had disappeared as the girls talked, and with dusk rapidly falling over the park, they swung through the scraping branches of the tree, finding the journey down much easier than the one up. They bundled up their basket, their bikes, and the paints, and began down the path hand in hand, no questions needed for their separation for school beginning tomorrow. It was not a new entity for them, and they knew they would figure it out.

As the path split—one towards North St. Louis, the other towards South, they hugged and quickly made way to their bikes. Fireflies had begun to illuminate the lavender night sky, and both girls felt rest in the fact of being known and loved so well by a friend. They pulled off on their separate paths, both humming the songs Inez’s mother had taught them, an old lullaby that brought them both comfort for whatever might come next. Betty, voracious reader she was, would gather stories and books for them to play out in the park next year, and Inez, extrovert that she was, would listen to the stories her mother would tell her, sermons from her neighbors and gossip at school, collecting interesting details that Betty would love.

It was with no concern that they parted that day. They shouted out their favorite line to one another, bells on bikes ringing, their habitual goodbye.

Inez, always, “Love you to the moon!” and, as one season follows the next, Betty’s reply, “And to Saturn!”