Arcadia Falls (10 page)

“Well, at least if you were Stephen Hawking you’d finally score a set
of wheels, Clyde.” This remark comes from a red-haired boy sitting next to Tori—Victoria Pratt, I guess from the roster—who wears identical jeans and a polo shirt with its collar popped up. He’s the boy that Isabel joked with last night, Justin Clay. He and Tori exchange a high five as Clyde turns pink and slouches back down in his seat.

“Hey,” Hannah chirps, “if Clyde did trade places with Stephen Hawking, would that mean that Stephen Hawking would have to take Clyde’s place? I mean, that would probably be cool for him because he could walk around and be in a regular body—” Hannah begins to blush as she realizes she’s trapped herself into discussing her classmate’s body. I notice that Clyde seems to be breaking out in hives. I decide to jump in before he goes into anaphylactic shock.

“Exactly. In fact, it would be interesting to see if Stephen Hawking would want to ever go back. He might find life at the Arcadia School too appealing.”

This sets off a round of speculation on how the British physicist would take to life at Arcadia: how he’d like the food, whom he might date, what sports he’d go out for, and whether anyone would notice that he was inhabiting the body of Clyde Bollinger. Just when they’ve exhausted all the scenarios they can envision, Hannah Weiss pipes up with another identity.

“J. K. Rowling,” she says. “I’d like to be J. K. Rowling for a month.”

“So you can live in a British castle?” Clyde asks.

“No! Well,
not just
for that. I’d like to see what it feels like to have that kind of imagination. And to look at all her notes to see what she plans to write next.”

A number of students second Hannah’s choice and I’m grateful to see that the teasing has abated. Instead of Hollywood celebrities the names of famous writers are bandied about. In addition to J. K. Rowling, Stephen King and Dan Brown lead the list, but also included are the graphic novelist Alan Moore and “that guy who wrote
Fight Club.”
Internet tycoons follow—Steve Jobs, of course, but also Mark Zuckerberg who, I learn when I admit my ignorance, made so much money from inventing Facebook that he dropped out of Harvard. The final celebrity
candidate is Bono, the lead singer of U2, both for his musical talent and humanitarian work. I’m about to move on when Chloe, whose full name on the roster appears as Chloe Lotus Dawson, raises her hand. She’s been unusually quiet all period. I assume she’s tired from last night’s revelries. She looks pale and her light blue eyes are rimmed with red. “Yes, Chloe?”

“Does it have to be a celebrity?”

“Not at all,” I answer, grateful for the question.

“Could it be …” Chloe’s voice trails off and she looks out the window toward the giant copper beech tree. Just visible beside it are the smoldering remains of last night’s bonfire. “Could it be yourself, only yourself yesterday? Like a past version of yourself?”

Chloe’s question strikes me dumb, and the entire class as well. I’ve been studying the changeling story in fairy tale and folklore for a couple of years now and I’ve never come across a version in which the changeling trades places with another version of itself. But as I think about it I realize that there is an element in some of the stories that the changeling itself was a child deprived of a normal childhood and that by stealing another child’s place it gets to reexperience its own childhood minus its flaws and heartbreaks.

“You mean so that you could relive your past … more perfectly?”

“Like a do-over,” Clyde says, looking toward Chloe. Chloe glances at Clyde and blanches. Then she looks away from him and meets my look.

“Yeah, like a do-over.”

“I don’t see why not. After all, this is your fairy tale and fairy tales are nothing if not flexible. Look at what Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, the founders of this school, did with them. They took the old changeling story and rewrote it to tell the story of the young women who came here to Arcadia in the thirties and forties and were able to reinvent themselves. How many of you have read it?”

I’m expecting at least a few raised hands—after all, the story was written by the school’s founders—but no one responds. Then I realize that it’s not in the collection that Vera published after Lily died—
Tales of Arcadia
. It was only printed in a limited edition.

“Huh,” I say, trying to think how I can continue with the assignment
I planned to give the class—the assignment that all of this talk is supposed to have led up to. To buy myself a few minutes I rummage through my book bag and retrieve my old, worn copy of
The Changeling Girl
. It’s the copy I first found at my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn and which I’d read over and over again sitting on the linoleum floor beneath her kitchen table. As soon as I take it out, I feel the eyes of my students lock onto the cover. The illustration chosen for the cover is one of the most striking in the whole book. It shows the peasant girl kneeling beneath the bloodred copper beech at sunset, cradling the root she’s just dug up in her arms as if it were a baby.

“It looks just like our copper beech,” Hannah says.

“I’m sure Vera and Lily used the tree as a model. Would you like to hear the story?”

I’m not expecting an enthusiastic response. The teenagers who a few minutes ago debated the relative merits of Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman surely don’t want to hear a bedtime story. But I’m wrong. The tapping of laptop keys and shuffling of bodies stills. Even Tori Pratt stops slapping her bedroom slipper against her bare heel and sits up a little straighter.

Leaning against the edge of a desk, I cradle the book in my left arm so that the class can see the pictures. Luckily, I remember the story so well I hardly need to see the words. “
There once was a girl who liked to pretend she was lost,”
I begin. When I get to the part in the story where the peasant girl is running through the forest at night, the trees closing in around her and her lamp running out of oil, I feel the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end and, looking out at the class I meet Chloe Dawson’s wide, bloodshot eyes. She looks as if I’ve just described her worst nightmare. I consider stopping—it’s well past the hour we’ve been allotted—but when I start to close the book for just a second Hannah Weiss squeaks.

“You can’t stop now. Does she make it out of the forest alive?”

“Yes, but just barely. This last part, though, is a little … squicky,” I say, using one of Sally’s favorite words. Nobody objects to
squicky
. They only lean in closer.

“When she saw that the light in her lamp was failing, the peasant girl took her knife out of her belt and, cutting a deep gash in her arm, added more of her own blood to the remaining oil. The light flared up again, only now it was as red as the cooper beech leaves at sunset, as red as the heart of a hearthfire, as red as heart’s blood. The pine trees stomped and thrashed behind her, their resiny breath hot on the back of her neck, their boughs lashing her face. Her legs felt heavy and wooden and when she held up her arms she saw that her skin had roughened to bark. A lock of hair brushed against her face with the feathery touch of pine needles. And when a single tear rolled down her face it was sticky as tree sap. She was becoming a tree. The wind that moved through the forest chanted an invocation: ‘Stay with us. Live through the centuries with us.’ When she picked up her feet, roots clung to them. She felt so tired. Would it be so bad to become a tree?

“But then she caught a glimpse of light at the end of the path. The sun was rising in the fields beyond the forest. She could hear birds singing on the fence posts and smell the smoke of the farmhouse’s cookstove. She smelled bread and coffee and the heather that grew in the fields around her old home … and then she heard her mother’s voice calling her name. She ran, tearing the roots that clung to her feet and leaving bloody footsteps behind her. She ran for the gap between the trees that had shrunk to a mere slit, and leapt through it, the bark flaying her skin into peeling strips. But she didn’t care. She could see her childhood home, her mother standing on the stoop, her arms held open … and then she saw her. The changeling girl. Like herself, only grown taller and more beautiful. The changeling stepped into her mother’s embrace—
her mother’s!
—and bent her golden head down to kiss the old woman’s weathered cheek, and her mother lifted her face to the changeling as if she were lifting her face toward the sun
.

“The girl saw then that in the year that had lapsed her mother had gone blind. She saw, too, that the humble farmhouse she left behind had become a stately manse. Her sisters, who came out from the barn carrying pails of milk and baskets of eggs, were dressed in fine clothing. Everything the witch promised had come true. In exchange for her year in the witch’s cottage, her family had been granted wealth and prosperity. Nowhere did she see any sign that she had been missed. Her sisters greeted the changeling with kisses
and embraces far more fervent than any sign of affection she ever received from them. They preferred the changeling to her, she realized as she got to her feet. She looked down at her own torn clothing, her scratched arms and bleeding feet. But it was her hands that looked different. Her hands that had learned to paint and carve, mold clay and weave yarn. They weren’t the hands of a milkmaid anymore. Did she really want to spend her days milking the cows and gathering eggs?

“But what choice did she have? The path back to the witch’s house had closed behind her. She turned around to face the wall of trees, but instead she found herself face-to-face with the witch. The witch held a lantern up in her hands; the light pouring out of it was the red and gold of sunrise. The girl turned one more time to look at the farmhouse, but her mother and sisters had all gone inside. Only the changeling girl stood on the threshold, her eyes wide and frightened
.

“‘If you choose, you can turn her back,’ the witch said. ‘All you need do is sprinkle her with the soil from the roots of the beech tree and she will become a root again. I have the soil here.’

“The peasant girl turned back to the witch and saw that she was holding a handful of black dirt. It was the dirt that the changeling was staring at. She knew it held the power to change her back. The witch was offering the peasant girl the freedom to choose between her old and new life. ”

Before turning to the last page of the book, I look closely at the picture. The peasant girl stands on the edge of the forest framed by two women—the witch and the changeling. In all the other pictures of the witch, her face is hidden in shadows, but in this one the light of the lantern falls on her and illuminates her face, revealing features very much like the photos I’ve seen of Vera Beecher.

I sense the class waiting for me to finish the story, but instead I close the book.

After a moment’s silence, Hannah Weiss explodes. “Is that how it ends? What does the peasant girl do? Does she go back with the witch or to her family?”

“What do you think?” I ask, slipping the book back into my bag.

“You’re not going to tell us?” Clyde asks.

“I thought I’d let you figure it out,” I say. “Of course you can probably find the story on the Internet, but in the meantime, I’d like you to think about what you would do. Would you stay with the witch or go back to your old life? It might help you to finish the two assignments for this term, which are …” I pause to give them time to pick up pens or resuscitate their laptops. “One, research the lives of Lily Eberhardt and Vera Beecher and tell me why they wrote this version of the changeling story; and two—” Before I can give the second half of the assignment, though, a bell rings. Although they don’t get up, most of the students are already shoving books and laptops into backpacks. I can see that they’re eager to be gone. “It can wait till tomorrow,” I say.

When they’ve gone I look down at my roster. As each student had referred to another by name I had found them on the roster and added a few notes to help remember them later. By the end of the period I’d checked off all but one of the students signed up for the class: Isabel Cheney. It seems odd to me that a girl as ambitious as her would miss the first day of school.

I add the roster to my book bag and straighten up to leave. My eyes are drawn, inevitably, to the red glow of the copper beech tree outside the window. A gray insubstantial figure stands beneath it. I quickly realize it’s a reflection in the glass, but that does little to make it less chilling. The figure is Ivy St. Clare standing in the doorway of my classroom, silently watching me. I can’t be sure how long she’s been there, and I can’t help but recall what Sheriff Reade said last night.
She’s always watching
.

I
wait to see if the dean will come in, but after a moment the ghostly figure vanishes from the glass. I’m left with the unsettling feeling of having been spied on. It’s not the way I wanted to start out my first day on the job. I shoulder my bag and decide to track the dean down at her office. If she’s been observing my class, I want to know why.