The laughter from last night resumes after sunrise, but louder, as if the whole village wants to make sure their voices travel up to the VIP suite on the top floor of the inn.
“Child’s Tongue,” Babygirl can hear the neighbors say. They shout it, really, from their porches and at their mailboxes. The suite’s service bell has not chimed all morning.
“The general’s daughter spoke in Child’s Tongue,” the group of teens says among themselves from across the street. Their phones are out, no doubt playing video clips of the Independence Ceremony. There were nearly forty thousand views on the most popular clip of the night as of an hour ago, when Babygirl last checked. In another hour, who knows. Maybe all of Ube will have seen the video. Everyone will have heard Victoria speaking to Kalamansi Village’s Venerated Elders in Child’s Tongue.
Babygirl wipes down the front windows, waiting for the bell to signal whether Victoria is awake and needs anything. Victoria rang the bell punctually at nine the last couple days to let Babygirl know she was on her way down to breakfast.
The only sound, beyond everyone’s ridicule, is the nonstop buzzing of Babygirl’s phone. She’s already received a dozen DMs from her friends back in Ube City. She grimaces, thinking about the questions she knows will come. Was she there, at the Ceremony? Was the general’s daughter really staying at her inn? Was she still living in her home village? Was she planning to stay there forever?
One of the teens points at the inn. The patterned skin of her arm is mottled with white, as if an apparition had touched the black arrow pattern and turned it ghostly. The nerve to make fun of what happened last night and yet use laser pattern removal on herself. Not only did the effect look nothing like blank skin, but how could others know if the girl was trying to communicate something crucial, beyond words? Babygirl tugs the curtains closed.
“Make yourself useful,” Honey barks from behind her. When Babygirl turns, her mother is carrying a glass tea set into the dining room. A serving bowl topples off the tray and Honey swears when it shatters into glittering pieces. Honey’s shriveled expression hasn’t changed since the Ceremony. The usually even wave pattern across her face looks like a choppy sea.
Her mother has a point. The bell remains silent, making each second at the inn excruciating. Did Victoria hate her? Did she suspect her for any of what happened last night? Even so, Babygirl could make herself useful. She could make things right.
“I’ll buy a new set from the market,” Babygirl says. Honey doesn’t notice, now scolding Dude to clean the mess. Babygirl heads out the door and bikes through the group of teens, scattering them on her way to the market.
All week, Honey had been nothing but smug smiles and baited questions, ready to invoke the name of General Goodboy on anyone who would listen.
“Yes, the very same, surfacing from my pond, staying at my inn,” Honey repeated to friends ad nauseam up until last night. “It’s his daughter, of course, coming all the way from the Outside. She’s coming from the Philadelphia sinkhole network, in America. She’ll be here to return his ashes. A perfect Ube daughter.”
Honey only ever called her General Goodboy’s daughter. Babygirl isn’t sure her mother even knows Victoria’s name, much less that Victoria took her husband’s surname, Porter. If it hadn’t been for the Kalamansi Funeral Home sharing Victoria’s emails regarding her father’s ashes, if gossip didn’t spread around the village so fast, no one would’ve suspected this soft-spoken tourist with her unmoving star pattern had any relation to General Goodboy.
The general, after all, was a scumbag. There were so many festivities in Ube City when news of his death arrived last year that Babygirl doesn’t remember which parties she attended were to soil his legacy or to celebrate graduation. That behavior would be unthinkable in Kalamansi. Babygirl knows that now, more than ever.
Babygirl bikes past the Outsider army base named after him and curses to herself for not taking the long way to the market instead. She wouldn’t have minded going down the dirt roads over the one paved street in the village. The soldiers always got drunker and crasser during holidays. A handful of them whistle at Babygirl from behind the base’s gates. Their state-of-the-art sinkhole gurgles behind them.
“Hey, babygirl,” they call. “We got diamonds for you.” They stroke their chests and thrust their groins out, drawing little diamonds in the air with their blank hands that mimic Babygirl’s pattern. She pedals harder until their laughter is long behind her. When she looks down at her knuckles on the handlebars, the diamonds that normally spread themselves evenly across her hands are shrunken and gathered between her fingers, hiding.
When Babygirl was a child, she thought it was magic that the soldiers knew her name. Dude’s name, too. It wasn’t until her time at Ube City University that she learned how the military bases paid no attention to Ube naming traditions, that there was so little known about these alien words when the Outsiders arrived, and that to address someone at all was to mark them. To Outsiders, it turned into a joke. And so, foreign catcalls and pet names became Ube names. In her history proseminar, Babygirl’s professor played an old video of a blank soldier thanking a small child for fetching him a bucket of water and a newspaper.
“You did good, boy,” the soldier said. He then barked after the child, mimicking a dog. Babygirl doesn’t remember class discussion after the video. She only remembers her rage.
Not that she needed more rage when it came to General Goodboy, who sold his fellow resistance fighters out for money and a life in America. Outsiders had repaid him further with the title of the hero of Kalamansi Village, signs of him everywhere for Outside tourists to gleam at. Babygirl spent her freshman year being scrutinized and tested by her dorm mates, as if she were a germ.
“How do you feel about Independence?” the friends she wanted to make asked her. They weren’t all from the city. Even those from smaller towns than hers watched her as if she were behind glass. The only other Goodboy supporters they had seen before were the occasional conspirators yelling nonsense on street corners. Other than that, most stayed safely away from villages based near major military bases and other areas in Babygirl’s province that flew pro-Goodboy flags during Outsider holidays. Kalamansi was so removed from the rest of them. Functional sinkholes there were few and far between. “Do you know what really happened? Why Outsiders still station soldiers here?”
For the rest of her collegiate life, Babygirl explored this new history, the one that never reached her province, much less the general’s home village. She knew about the accidental discovery of Ube by Outsiders through sinkhole exploration, and the secondary discovery of land, such an enormous amount of land. Whatever the Outsiders had done to the Outside, land had become scarce, and they needed extra storage space and dumping grounds.
What she wasn’t supposed to learn was the extent of their violence and dehumanization. How they surfaced through the Ube’s sacred lakes, then through communal wells and hot springs when the need for more space led to less regulated and more invasive efforts. She never thought twice about the presence of Outsiders’ guns or tanks, no matter how close she lived to the base. She certainly never expected targeted journalists, or installed puppet leaders, or curfews, or trick sinkholes in guerilla warfare.
Every night, Babygirl blushed over her textbooks, ashamed that she had never known about any of this. Like the rest of Kalamansi, she was taught that the foreign occupation was a sign of camaraderie, a lasting symbol of friendship after Ube gained Independence. A sham independence they celebrate every year.
At the Ceremony last night, Victoria blushed, too, during the silence that dragged on before the Elders spoke and continued the Ceremony as if nothing had happened. When the first snickers rose from the audience, Victoria glanced at Babygirl as she had all weekend, her face pleading for help. The stars across her skin, as she knew from legends about the general, stayed motionless.
Babygirl skids off the road at the memory before she rights her bike and locks it around an invasive palm tree a block from the market. If she can avoid anyone’s attention, it would be a miracle. She gets as far as the first dozen stalls before she hears someone call to her.
“Babygirl, you were right,” Bro says from what feels like half the village away. Babygirl inhales sharply, watching heads from nearby stalls swivel between him and her. “That snobby general’s daughter isn’t Ube. She refused to take pictures at any of the sites.”
When Victoria arrived at the inn, shivering and clammy from sinkhole travel, she flinched at the wooden bust of her father in the foyer. Babygirl changed the sheets in Victoria’s suite the morning after and saw that the framed portrait of the general had been reversed to face the wall. When Bro, the head of the village’s tourism bureau, stopped by to offer Victoria a private tour of the Goodboy Museum and Estate in exchange for promotional images to post on social media, Victoria declined.
She asked Babygirl if she could, instead, book a hiking trip to Suha Falls, a meager but natural wonder that Outsiders have clearance to use for industrial disposal. Babygirl caught Bro sulking by her pond as she accompanied Victoria and her husband to the village depot to rent mopeds for the journey.
“Doesn’t care about our history, has no pride in our culture,” Bro continues. “And on top of that, she only knows Child’s Tongue.”
Dollface pokes her head out from behind her fortune-telling stand.
“You should’ve known from that blank husband she has,” Dollface says. “No respect for the Ube. No respect for her father either.”
Dollface had yanked Victoria’s hand from the handle of her moped as they left the village for the falls, promising a complimentary reading for a pattern this rare. Victoria snatched her hand away and hurried on wordlessly. Halfway through the journey, Victoria cracked a joke about how Outsiders always touch her skin, too.
“You knew from the very start, though,” Dollface says to Babygirl. “That city university education actually did you some good. You’ll get one of those fancy jobs on the Outside someday, Babygirl. Just remember where you come from, unlike that blank-loving general’s daughter with her blank name. A waste of that beautiful star pattern. Disgraceful.”
Babygirl excuses herself from Bro and Dollface. Remember where she comes from? Babygirl is more than happy to run away and forget.
Babygirl squeezed in twenty more job applications for positions in Ube City the day before Victoria arrived. Like every other application she’s sent out since she graduated last year, none have been answered. The tips she gets at the inn are generous enough, but nowhere near what she’d need to rent an apartment in the city without a steady job.
She pushes through the thick of the market and rounds the corner to the main square, pausing to see what’s left of the Ceremony. The workers are nearly done deconstructing the stage by the sacred lake, hauling away speakers and screens, but there’s still enough of it left that Babygirl’s memory bleeds out of her. She needs to grab something here that she forgot in last night’s chaos, and instead of the determination that emboldened her at the inn, all she feels now in the middle of the village is shame.
Babygirl was the one who asked Victoria if she’d like to participate in the Ceremony over the roar of Suha Falls. Victoria agreed while catching her breath from the hike, her gaze settling on the industrial detritus below. As Babygirl texted the Elders about Victoria’s decision, she almost missed Victoria pulling a lumpy plastic bag out of her backpack and flinging it over the edge.
Babygirl dropped her phone when the bag hit the sharp bottom and burst into dust, fogging the water. Ashes would never be honored that way. One may as well defile the corpse itself. Perhaps it was a horrifying Outsider mourning ritual?
When she picked her phone up, the Elders group chat buzzed with enthusiasm. Victoria turned to Babygirl and smiled, thanking her for being a fantastic guide. Even then, Babygirl only saw her as the traitor’s daughter. The village was in need of a new hero, a true hero, and Babygirl thought it would be her.
To jog her memory about what she needs, Babygirl thinks about the order of the Independence Ceremony. First, the presentation of the Venerated Elders. The Elders’ recitation of the Outsiders’ arrival and how they exploited the land. Then the presentation of the General, a role often played by a child or young person recognized for their community service. Babygirl played the role when she won the National Spelling Bee and got a scholarship to Ube City. She was fifteen, long past the age when she would have spoken in Child’s Tongue.
The Venerated Elders test the General on his goodness, his dedication to the Ube people, and whether he will bring peace to the land.
“Yes, I’ll be good, Daddy,” Victoria replied last night.
The Elders paused. No one had thought to rehearse with the general’s daughter—she was the general’s daughter. The general himself approved the order and language of the Ceremony before he left Ube.
“Yes, I’ll be good, sir,” Victoria replied to the second question about dedication.
“Yes, I’ll be good, I’m sorry,” Victoria replied to the third about peace. Her flushed face made her star pattern brighten under the harsh lights.
“Does Honey need more tea, Babygirl?” asks someone behind her.
“Yes, I’ll be good,” Babygirl says before stopping herself. She hasn’t spoken Child’s Tongue in over a decade and notices her hands shaking. The words hold a warbling quality that taste bittersweet in Babygirl’s mouth. When Babygirl turns around, Venerated Elder Sweetie holds out a cloth bag of home-dried tea and a boxed tea set. Babygirl takes them and pulls her wallet out, but Sweetie puts her hand up and plucks a thick manila folder from the bottom of her ware cart.
“You left this behind last night,” Sweetie says, slapping the file into Babygirl’s hands. “It was underneath the treaty portfolio.”
The next step of the Ceremony is the Elders wishing the General well in the fight for Independence. A traditional ballad plays as the General is handed a copy of the Independence Treaty inside a leather portfolio case, chosen for the drama it adds to the Ceremony. Babygirl was tasked with handing her the portfolio. The General then returns to the stage and presents the treaty to the Elders.
“Did you enjoy being right about her?” Sweetie asks. She shakes her head and shoves her cart down the sidewalk before Babygirl can answer. Babygirl slides the file into her purse.
Bro and Dollface are still trading stories about all of Victoria’s mishaps to a small crowd of vendors when Babygirl walks past.
“You knew something was going to happen at the Ceremony. You’re the smartest girl in Kalamansi,” Bro calls after her. Babygirl hurries away, pretending she can’t hear him.
• • •
At the inn, Babygirl finds Dude sweeping the dining room floor and trying to ignore Priscilla’s flirtations. She doesn’t have to ask him to know that the service bell hasn’t rung. Babygirl feels bad for her brother—Priscilla has spent a month at the inn every dry season for the last three years, and every visit she becomes more enamored with Dude and more of a caricature of herself.
“Have you heard?” Priscilla says, beaming at Babygirl when she enters the room. “The Porters are leaving today.”
Priscilla’s painted-on heart pattern is smudged from the heat, the brown ink pooling to her pale, blank temples and in the cradles of her collarbones. Neither Babygirl nor Dude has ever explained to her that heart patterns don’t exist, or how rare brown patterns are on the Ube, even on mixed Ube people. During Priscilla’s first stay at the inn, she prattled on about the spirituality of Ube traditions, the deep ancestry research she did to find a grandmother who was one-eighth Ube, how she always knew she was meant to be part of this culture.
“How could you come all the way here and know nothing?” Priscilla says, the excitement in her voice evident in this taunt. Since Victoria’s arrival, Priscilla pouted at the brown star pattern, the beautiful face. She glowered anytime Honey referred to Victoria as the general’s daughter.
“Victoria’s never been to Ube, Priscilla,” Dude says.
“Princess,” Priscilla corrects him. Neither Babygirl nor Dude has explained to her that Princess is an exceedingly uncommon Ube name. “And doesn’t that make it worse? She hasn’t responded to the funeral home about the shrine for her father’s ashes, she’s rude to the locals, everyone bends over backwards to speak Outsider for her, and she only knows Child’s Tongue? Not High Formal Ube? Or at least Modern Ube? She disrespected the Venerated Elders in front of the whole village.”
Babygirl bites her tongue. Honey threatened to dock her pay last time Babygirl argued with a guest. Priscilla’s terrible Ube pronunciation aside, she missed Dude’s point entirely.
“She only did the Ceremony because it was Babygirl’s idea,” Dude says. He stops sweeping to look her in the eyes. Babygirl tightens her jaw. She gloated to him before Victoria arrived over beers next to their backyard pond, hinting that this general’s daughter would not be what she seemed. “Mom wants you to bring a breakfast tray up to her suite. One guest only. Her husband will join us down here.”
Babygirl’s phone rings. She feels Dude’s glare follow her into the kitchen.
“This is the Center for Ube Progress,” the HR representative says once Babygirl answers. “We’ve received your application and would like to discuss your interest in the research assistant position. Are you available to come to our offices next Monday?”
Finally. She’d be on her way out of Kalamansi Village soon. Babygirl schedules her interview, confirms the proper sinkhole transit stops, and arranges the tray of food. She rounds the corner from the kitchen to the dining room and nearly drops the whole tray on Norman, Victoria’s husband.
“I’m sorry,” he says as he dodges out of her way and takes a seat at the table. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but was that CUP? I’m the associate director for their postsecondary education department in their Philadelphia branch. They’re an incredible non-profit think tank. Let me put a good word in for you.”
Babygirl’s heart falls the way the tray almost did. Unlike most other blank tourist men who got transgressive thrills out of calling the Ube their names and joking about how bizarre Ube culture is, Norman had been humble, listening actively to villagers throughout their stay. For someone with blank skin, Norman seemed like a good man and a supportive husband. Dude’s eyes bore into her from across the room.
“It’s a position in Ube City,” Babygirl explains. “I’d be doing ethnographic work, looking through case studies, and doing recordkeeping.”
“Sounds perfect since you’re so good at research,” Dude adds. Norman nods, impervious to the edge in Dude’s voice.
“After all your help guiding us, teaching us about Ube, inviting us to that ceremony last night, I’d be more than happy to send my recommendation,” Norman says.
A good man and supportive husband, but clueless, and maybe better because of it. The laughter after the Ceremony was so callous that Victoria dragged Norman back to the inn with her immediately, despite his confusion about why they couldn’t join in on the post-Ceremony festivities.
The tray trembles as Babygirl climbs the stairs. She stops at the first floor, balancing the tray as she rubs her shoulder from the new weight of her purse, the contents inside adding more strain to the strap. Dude was right: all of this was her fault. He knew nothing good would come from Babygirl’s insistence that Victoria participate in the Ceremony. Victoria must know now, beyond a doubt, that this was the plan all along. She may not be the general’s daughter in the way everyone expected her to be, but that didn’t mean she didn’t deserve to be angry.
On the night that General Goodboy’s death was announced, Babygirl and her proseminar friends had gotten drunk and snuck into the Rare Collections room with a grad student’s ID card. It took them all of ten minutes to find the classified orders and sensitive information on resistance groups that General Goodboy had provided to Outsider armies. At the back of the file was the list of the terms Goodboy had agreed to for his services: the wealth, the lifestyle, the prestige, the positioning of himself as a hero, the mass media campaign and military might to make sure his legacy remained untouched.
“Think the Outsiders will burn it?” one of her friends asked. “Or any Goodboy sympathizers for that matter?”
“Not if I can help it,” Babygirl said, taking the file and slipping it into her backpack. Her friends cheered. “It’s my graduation gift.”
And what better plan did Babygirl have for making sure this file could never be destroyed and never be dismissed than forcing everyone at the Independence Ceremony to reckon with it?
She didn’t have access to the university library system anymore, and besides, the Kalamansi security filters kept her from downloading anti-Goodboy documents. Much of Ube could access every document in this file with a simple click. The Outsiders had, of course, not been true to their word about keeping Goodboy’s reputation spotless throughout all of Ube. Disinformation campaigns failed everywhere else except the most militarized regions. Kalamansi, however, was easy enough to control with their steadfast reverence of the general.
She hates that she was left in the dark for so long, how her friends in Ube City had suspected her of being brainwashed like everyone else from Kalamansi Village until she could prove otherwise. Victoria’s presence had been a perfect reason to bring the file to light. All it would take was a simple switch at the Ceremony—the file instead of the treaty. With the file, she could destroy Goodboy’s legacy and force the village to come to terms with its pride and its true history, reading aloud each damning document while the general’s own daughter stood there, powerless to change history.
The last thing she expected was for Goodboy’s legacy to destroy itself.
“Daddy, sir, I’m sorry,” Victoria said to the Venerated Elders when they called upon her to present the treaty. “I know nothing, Daddy, sir, please, don’t hurt me, sir, thank you, sir, you know better than me, Daddy, sir, yes, sir, I’ll be good, sir, please, I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t just that she had spoken in Child’s Tongue. Victoria took no meaning from the words. Her repetition of nonsense came from a long-held misunderstanding and fear.
Babygirl had been too shocked to make the switch. She handed Victoria the treaty instead after the Elders told her to bring it forward. The sadness that bloomed on Victoria’s face when she saw what she was holding was momentary, but Babygirl caught it all the same. It was clear that Victoria hadn’t known anything about Ube culture from the moment she set foot in the inn, but she had known all along about her father. Worse things than any classified file could contain.
Even more nauseating was how the villagers chose to focus on the Child’s Tongue rather than the actual content of Victoria’s words. It was easier to humiliate Victoria than to hold the general accountable for his atrocities. If this moment wasn’t going to change their worldview, nothing would. Certainly not a declassified file. There was never a chance for her to become a hero. What a selfish thing to want, in the end.
Victoria pulls a shirt over her camisole when Babygirl enters the room. As she fixes the buttons, Babygirl notices the scars on her shoulders and upper arms, the star pattern erased in patches. No wonder she wore sleeves despite the heat. Her brow is furrowed, and her fingers make a listless dance across her chest. She seems more stressed than upset, but she doesn’t answer when Babygirl wishes her a good morning. The smile she tugs to the sides of her face is false and testy. If the stars could move, they might share a more exact emotion, but this is exactly what made the general so good at deception. If no one knew how you felt through your skin, you had to rely on performance. Victoria looks into Babygirl’s eyes and performs. Poorly.
“Thank you for breakfast, but I don’t have much of an appetite,” she says.
Babygirl sets the tray down on the nightstand and watches Victoria squirm and reach for a cup of tea. She had been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she hadn’t considered that Victoria could be anything other than furious at what happened last night. Babygirl doesn’t need patterned skin to tell that there’s also fear and shame at what she had done. Victoria looks so small, so harmless—nothing like the vapid, entitled tourist Babygirl had projected onto her. Victoria’s laptop sits at the foot of the bed, the window open to an Ube City Inquirer article about the Ceremony, the same clip everyone had been circulating paused to the Elders’ disgusted faces. When Babygirl leans closer, she reads the tabs—What is Child’s Tongue?, How to Translate Ube, The Four Levels of Ube Formality.
“I did a lousy job yesterday,” Victoria says. “I’m sorry I ruined such a nice opportunity.”
The apology isn’t Victoria’s to give. Babygirl pulls the folder out of her purse.
“I wanted to give this to you last night,” Babygirl says, “during the Ceremony.”
The file looks ancient from decades of fingerprints and wrinkles and dust. Victoria gives a hollow thanks and places the folder next to her pillow until she realizes Babygirl won’t leave the room. She sighs as she bends the brads back and pulls out the documents in one large heap. Her frustration turns into stunned silence. After a few moments, her lips curl up in amusement.
“Close the door,” she asks Babygirl.
Victoria fans the contents of the file across the foot of the bed and stands up. She starts from one side of the bed to the other, picking each paper up and rearranging them into smaller piles as she goes on. Then, Victoria starts laughing, quiet and relieved at first, then growing harder with each document she skims over. Once she gets to the list of terms that her father agreed to, she’s crying. Her hands tremble the way Babygirl’s have all morning, and so Babygirl grabs one and squeezes it. Victoria rests her head on Babygirl’s shoulder and lets out half a laugh, half a sob.
“He hated it here,” Victoria explains, using her free hand to wipe her eyes. “He hated Ube, he hated his skin, he hated me and how much I looked like him. He wanted to be an Outsider. He thought Outsiders were superior in every way. It’s why he never came back.”
She shakes her head at one document—the financial breakdown of assets that would be poured into an estate and several untraceable Outside accounts.
“He got maybe half that amount,” Victoria says. “He praised the Outsiders anyway for their generosity.”
You did good, boy. Babygirl thinks back to the video she watched in class. How little things have changed.
“Everyone here loves him. Everyone expects me to love him. I wanted to leave all traces of him behind. He’s trash and I wanted him buried with trash,” Victoria continues. She collects all the documents and places them back in the file. She looks at Babygirl, her next words careful. “I was so happy when he died.”
In Ube City, Babygirl befriended an upperclassman whose parents disappeared because of their anti-Outsider journalism. The university lecture series invited a guest from a far-flung province who showed the scars he still carried from the time he was caught on the street past curfew without updated documentation, delivering infant formula to the local children’s hospital. One of her history courses included an assignment to visit the infamous Death Sink, where incalculable numbers of resistance fighters were drowned in a sinkhole to nowhere. There were so many street fireworks that went off on campus the night General Goodboy died that it was hard to discern everyone’s faces in all the light, but Babygirl remembers the tears, glistening and cathartic and endless, on every person whose eyes met hers.
“I was happy, too,” Babygirl says. Victoria’s smile tells Babygirl that it’s the one thing she thought she would never hear. It is exactly what she needs to hear the most.
Babygirl tells her about the Rare Collections room and how simple it was to access the file. She talks about the celebrations on campus following the general’s death—the chants, the cheers, the crude effigies they filled with sparklers and set aflame. Victoria’s laughter returns and echoes through the suite.
When the Porters check out of the inn, Victoria dips her feet into the backyard pond, the file secure in her backpack. Before she sinks in completely, she looks back at Babygirl and waves, thanking her, as always, for being a fantastic guide. Babygirl stays until the bubbles disappear.
• • •