What Has Become of You (3 page)

“I know you all know each other at this point,” she said, “but since
I
don’t know you yet, it would be helpful to have a little info about you before we get started today. So what I’d like to have you do is pair up with someone. Pair up with the person you’re sitting next to; that would be easiest. I realize we have an odd number of students right now, so can we have someone be a group of three? Maybe you three up front?”

Begrudgingly, the girls looked at one another. Some of them smirked. Some moved their notebooks a little closer together. “I’m going to give you five minutes to interview the person next to you,” Vera said. “You can ask her anything—about her family, her likes and dislikes, her favorite foods or TV shows, her favorite class . . . basically, anything that she’d be willing to share with the rest of us. You can jot down her answers in your notebooks so you don’t forget them. When five minutes are up, I will ask you to switch off, and the person you’ve just interviewed will interview you. When we’re done, you’ll be introducing your partner to me.”

There was some buzzing, a possible threat of resistance, before the girls bowed heads and gamely went about the activity. In teaching terms, what Vera had asked them to do was known as an icebreaker exercise, designed to make students comfortable with one another on the first day of class. But these students were already comfortable with one another. It was Vera who was uncomfortable. She wondered if they could see through her transparent tactic to buy some time for herself—to put
herself
at ease. Based on the smirks, she suspected some of them did.

She walked rather ineffectually up and down the rows of tables, pretending to take note of what the students were writing down. Most didn’t seem to be interviewing each other; she heard a girl in one pair say, “I called Ryan last night. He wasn’t expecting that at
all
,” but she didn’t chide her. At least the girls were talking and weren’t silently in revolt.

The minutes passed. A little later than she perhaps should have—the girls had devolved into relaxed chatter about topics blatantly having nothing to do with their interviews—Vera raised her voice over everyone else’s and said, “Let’s regroup. Who’d like to start by introducing her partner?”

Mercifully, a girl with short, curly auburn hair raised a chubby hand. “I’m Jamie Friedman, and I interviewed Harmony Phelps,” she said, gesturing to a broad-shouldered girl with a knitted cap pulled down over her eyebrows. Vera thought about asking the girl to remove her cap. She decided it wasn’t worth it. “Harmony is a sophomore at the Wallace School,” Jamie went on. The other girls tittered. “She’s fifteen. She’ll be sixteen next month. She’s a Taurus. She lives with her mom and dad and her brother and sister and her dog, Bella. She likes watching CNN and C-SPAN. Her favorite food is vegetarian stir-fry. She doesn’t eat meat. Her favorite subjects are political science and women’s studies.”

She probably has a sister named Liberty,
Vera thought,
and a brother named Leaf.
She nodded and listened, going up and down the rows, taking mental notes to help set each student apart in her mind. There was Aggie Hamada, for example, who seemed somehow more all-American than anyone else in the class—she radiated cleanliness, like an ad for Noxzema—and had won trophies for horse jumping. Then there was Martha True, a peer leader in a church youth group; Vera, who had no religious feelings of her own, worried that the girl would come to find her morally objectionable in some way. As they were nearly finished, Vera gave a start—there was a twelfth girl seated, a girl she hadn’t noticed before. “Ah. We’ve got a dirty dozen, after all. You must be”—she checked her roster—“Jensen Willard.”

The girl sitting at the desk was small, with wispy dark hair cut in no particular style. She was wearing a charcoal-colored dress that looked like something someone’s grandmother had donated to Goodwill; it was made of a crinkly fabric, with a floppy, withered bow at the neck. The dress was accessorized with mud-caked combat boots, the long laces wound around her calves several times. Vera couldn’t help thinking that the girl’s style suited her. But how had she managed to creep in so quietly wearing those heavy boots?

“We were just finishing up introductions of each other,” Vera said to her, “mostly for my benefit. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about yourself?”

“Not really.”

Vera gave a tight smile. “Okay then. I suppose it’s only fair if I tell you all a little about me, and then we’ll talk a bit about what we’re going to be doing the rest of the school year.”

Vera abhorred talking about herself, but she did her best. She skipped the ignominy of her twenties (her acquisition of a flimsy undergraduate arts degree that netted her a succession of demeaning, low-paying jobs and inspired her decision to apply to graduate school) and bulldozed straight ahead to Princeton and the teaching fellowship and her job working for literary agent Christopher Sime. She tried to explain what a literary agent did, what the duties of a literary agent’s assistant were; she did not mention that the job had paid so poorly that she had had to move back to Maine, back into the arms of a high school sweetheart who had promised some financial security. She made a calculated mention of her experience teaching college English, neglecting to mention that she had never taught high school students before. Wondering how to wrap things up, she added lamely, “I live right here in Dorset—it’s just me, by myself. I’m working on a book based on a true-crime case, which I anticipate I’ll have completed within the year.”

The part about the book based on a real murder might have been best left unsaid. She had thirty-two rough manuscript pages written—not exactly what one might call a work in progress in the true sense of the word
progress
. She hoped none of the girls would inquire further about this point. But of course one hand shot up. It was Loo Garippa’s. “What true-crime case are you writing about?” she asked.

“Well,” Vera demurred, “I don’t like to tell too much about an unfinished project. I worry that it’ll jinx things. But I promise, when there’s more to tell, you’ll all be among the first to know. “

“Is it about that murder that happened here last month?” Loo persisted. “Angela from the middle school?”

“She was Finister’s niece,” Harmony Phelps said. “I mean, his niece by marriage.”

“Who is Finister?” Vera asked.

“The
dean
,” several of the girls chorused. Vera could almost read their minds:
Who is this woman, this so-called
teacher
, who doesn’t even know who our dean is?

“Oh, of course. Dean Finister. I knew that.”

The girls seemed truly engaged now, sitting up straighter, eyes lighting up as though someone had snapped the cord of the shade that had obscured them. “My aunt works with the police force,” Chelsea Cutler said, puffing out her full chest by another inch or two. “She worked on the Angela Galvez case. She helped arrest the guy who did it.”

“This is an older case I’m writing about,” Vera said.
Sit
down
,
she told herself.
Look casual.
She stopped in her tracks and lowered her behind onto the table at the front of the room; as she attempted to cross her legs, the table pitched forward an inch, almost depositing Vera on the floor. Recovering as the table steadied itself, she pulled her skirt down lower over her knees and said, “But isn’t that a shame, what happened to that little girl?”

Some of the students nodded, and she felt that they wanted to talk about this; she saw this as her first possible point of connection, her first opportunity to get through to them.

“She was strangled,” Aggie Hamada said soberly.

“Yes, I’m afraid that’s so. I read all about that.”

“I heard the guy they’ve got in jail now might not be the one who did it,” Harmony Phelps said. “There’s this guy who drives around town trying to pick up girls in his car so he can rape them. But nobody’s caught
him
yet.”

Chelsea turned to face the girl in the row behind her. “Are you saying my aunt got the wrong person?”

“I’m not singling her out. But you have to admit, the police can be pretty sketchy.”

Vera could see that Harmony’s retort was about to take this tangent to a potentially uglier place. She quickly got off the table and reached for a stack of handouts; she tried to ignore the dejection on the students’ faces as she cleared her throat and distributed the lesson plan that covered the remaining twelve weeks of the school year.

“Getting back to business,” she said, “I understand you’ve just finished
Macbeth
. As Mrs. Belisle must have told you, the next few weeks are largely going to be spent reading
The Catcher in the Rye
. Does anyone happen to have her copy of
Catcher
with her today? Please forgive me; I tend to refer to it as
Catcher
just as shorthand.” None of the girls said a word, though Vera saw copies of the books on several girls’ desks. She picked up the copy on the desk of the girl nearest her—Kelsey Smith—and held it up for all to see. The book trembled a little in Vera’s hand. “This is
Catcher
,” she said, “and you should definitely all have it with you in class tomorrow. Has anybody read it before?”

Two hands went up: Jensen Willard’s and that of one of the tall modelesque girls—Autumn Fullerton, Vera confirmed, sneaking a glance at her roster again. “Autumn,” she said, returning the copy of Salinger’s novel to its owner and moving toward the tall girl’s seat, “if I asked you to tell the class what the book is about, in just a few words, what would you tell us?”

“Um,” Autumn said. “It’s about a boy? I think he’s sixteen? The book was written a long time ago, I guess, and the book is mostly just him talking.”

Vera glanced at Jensen Willard in the third row. She could have sworn she saw the girl give an eye roll, but when she saw Vera looking at her, she glued her eyes to the desk. Vera had been about to ask her to put in her own two cents about Holden Caulfield, but something in the girl’s demeanor made her think better of it.

Vera turned around and wrote the words
NARRATIVE VOICE
on the whiteboard in large letters. “Narrative voice,” she said. “Did Mrs. Belisle talk to you about what this is?”

“A narrative is a story,” Jamie Friedman offered.

“That’s right. It’s a story. And what does
voice
mean, in terms of writing? What is a writer’s voice? Could you define
that
?”

Vera felt as if the students were already growing tired of her. She could practically read their minds; if she wasn’t going to talk about something interesting like homicide, then they wished she would just present a lecture and quit bugging them with questions. “Let’s think of it in terms of singers,” Vera went on doggedly. “If I asked you to listen to snippet of a song by, say, Mick Jagger”—
Jesus, I hope they know who Mick Jagger is,
Vera thought,
and why do I have to use words like
snippet
?
—“chances are you would be able to recognize him right away. His voice is that unique and that distinctive. It is as individual as a fingerprint. It has a . . . well, a classic rock swagger to it. One of the first swaggering rockers of that particular type, really. Each of you probably has your own singing voice, good or bad. You have your own unique
writing
voice as well.”

Vera went on, trying to explain and illustrate the concept of narrative voice and why it is important. Most of the girls seemed to be actually listening, which emboldened her a little. Then Harmony Phelps’s hand went up again. “Mrs. . . .” She looked at the board. “Lundy?”

“I’m a
Miss
. Yes, Harmony?”

“Why do we have to read a narrative about a teenage boy? We’re all females here. I think it would be more valuable for us to read about a girl. We already just read about a bunch of guys, in
Macbeth
.”

“Lady Macbeth wasn’t a guy,” one of the girls said.

“Well, the whole thing felt very masculine. It was all about masculinity,” Harmony said, and then added virtuously, as though this explained it all, “It was
Shakespeare
.”

“Yet as I understand it, the writing assignments you did in relation to
Macbeth
were about yourself.” Vera was pacing the room now, her arms wrapped around her rib cage as though she were cold. “You wrote journals and personal essays about subjects like rivalry and ambition and the tragic hero, and you applied these themes to your own life. It will be much the same with
Catcher
, though the themes will be different, of course. I’m going to ask you to work on your first journal entry tonight after you read the first four chapters of the book. In general, unless I specify otherwise, I will be collecting your
Catcher
journals every Friday. We’ll be taking breaks with other readings, too, so when the subject of the journals changes, I will let you know in advance.”

The inevitable peevish riot of questions followed.
How long does each entry have to be? What is it supposed to be about? Does it have to be typed?
When Vera said that the journals could be about “anything,” some of the students seemed pleased while others looked deeply unhappy. Glancing at the clock, Vera saw there was a little extra time left in the class—maybe seven minutes. Panicking a little, she picked up her copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
and said, “Let me read the beginning bit from the first chapter aloud. If you have your books with you, you can read along silently. This first paragraph alone sets the tone and establishes the voice. It’ll give you a flavor of what’s to come.”

And then, at last, the class was over. Before Vera had even finished reading, the room began to fill with the decisive sound of book bags being repacked and girls pushing their chairs back from the tables. Jamie Friedman smiled at Vera as she headed out—Jamie Friedman, she thought, was a wise, calculating girl, knowing how to cater to adults. Such a girl might be useful to have in the classroom. The two model-y girls lingered behind, conferring with each other about something, and Jensen, who had showed up in class last, was also last to make any signs of leaving it, slowly packing her school things into a large army knapsack that had symbols written all over it with a Sharpie. Coming over to the girl’s seat, Vera said, “Jensen, I got your email. I’m sorry I didn’t respond, as I saw it kind of late. It’s fine for you to use that other edition of
Catcher
. Thank you, though, for checking in.”