What Has Become of You (6 page)

Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey and Autumn Fullerton have fathers who are partnered in a law firm. They are both terrible people and also happen to be cokeheads, but all the teachers here at Wallace adore them to pieces. Kelsey Smith and Chelsea Cutler are both jocks who live for softball and field hockey. They’re actually as stupid as they come, but their slavish study habits will guarantee their entrance into good colleges later on down the line. Loo Garippa is the biggest poser I have ever met in my life. She wants everyone to think she’s all edgy and punk, but she’s really this closet happy person who has a new boyfriend every week. Aggie Hamada has never had a tough day in her life, although it’s rumored that one time in eighth grade she got an A-minus in science class and got grounded for two months because it wasn’t an A. Jamie Friedman has a new stepmother and is always talking about how much she hates her, but then in the same breath she’ll brag about the new designer outfit her stepmother bought her or how her stepmother is taking her on a skiing trip to Switzerland.

They’re all pretty contemptible. All of them yammering on blithely about stupid stuff while the world around them wells up with death and heartache and existential crises, which they don’t see or they don’t
care
to see. They don’t understand how easy it would be for their lives to be over in a minute.

This is a fact: From the time I was a little girl, I always knew life was more about sadness than anything else.

How did I know this? You mentioned music in class the other day. Something about Mick Jagger. When I was little, I used to cry at sad songs coming out of my parents’ CD player. I couldn’t make sense of most of the lyrics back then, but I could tell sadness from the way singers sang. The minor chords always give it away. I even knew when songs were secretly sad—songs that seemed upbeat enough on the surface but hid a sorrow that maybe even the songwriter didn’t want you to know about. I knew other things, too. I knew that most grown-ups really don’t know much more than children, though they pretend otherwise, and that it’s impolite to let on that you know this when you’re a child. From the day I was born, I saw far too much for my own good. I suppose you could say I had the curse of seeing the world in a clear-eyed way while having the manners to keep what I saw to myself.

In some ways I was childlike back then, and in other ways I wasn’t. I played with Annabel Francoeur, a girl my age who lived a few houses up the street from me, because I knew that every child was supposed to have at least one friend. We would play our games—girl-games she would dictate, ranging from soap operatic Barbie doll plotlines (Ken sleeps with Barbie’s sister Skipper) to games of “house” where I was always The Boy—but instead of feeling as though I were playing a game, I felt as though I were playing the role of a child playing a game and doing a shitty job of it. I’ve gotten better at playing roles since then, I guess.

Sure, I had fun sometimes as a kid; I can remember certain moments, certain silly and meaningless moments, like lying in Annabel’s backyard after sundown, the two of us side by side on our backs in the grass, and me thinking:
For the rest of my life I will remember what it feels like to lie in this grass. I will remember this dark sky.
And once I told myself I would remember, I never forgot. Not even now, long after Annabel has stopped wanting to associate with me.

When I was about nine years old, I had an epiphany. I was sitting on the embankment of my elementary school playground—alone, like always, because Annabel went to the Catholic school—and a thought occurred to me (or maybe more a premonition than a thought): Life is never going to be better than it is now. After this, it’ll just be one disappointment after another. Like I’ve been trying to say, if something is true, I can
feel
how true it is. So that’s something that’s changed me. Once you know something’s never going to get any better, you never have to waste energy on false hopes again. It’s kind of freeing, really.

And you wonder why a cheery soul like me doesn’t have any friends. Well, except maybe for one, if a boyfriend counts as a friend; I do have a boyfriend, sort of. A little later on I suppose I’ll have to tell you how I ended up with one of those.

It feels like I’m just getting warmed up—I swear you will be sorry you assigned me this journal—but I am being called down for dinner. It’s meat loaf, which means it’s going to be another bowl-of-cereal night for me. This journal entry ends on an anticlimax. This reminds me of something—having read all of
Catcher
(see, I do the shorthand, too), I have to ask if Holden’s mother ever cooked him meat loaf? Maybe that was part of Holden’s problem, not having a mother who made meat loaf and offered the standby option of a bowl of cereal. Just some food for thought, if you can excuse the bad pun. And P.S., I don’t think
The Catcher in the Rye
is all that great of a book, to be honest, but I know you have to teach it. I like
The Bell Jar
better.

Her arm completely asleep from resting her weight on it, Vera turned the last page of the journal as though expecting more, then looked again at the cover page. She was impressed with what she had just read. She thought,
I must warn her about discussing other students in her journal entries.
Then she thought:
Who am I kidding?
She found the observations too engrossing and too informative to censor. Vera already found herself recognizing the lens through which Jensen Willard saw the world.

Around four o’clock every morning, when the last of Dorset’s barflies had simmered down and the farmers were not yet awake, Vera often found herself driven out of bed in an attenuated state of alertness. She liked having this small window available to her just before dawn, when the hour was hers and hers alone to claim, and she frequently used this time for writing and researching. On this particular morning she was reading some of her files and transcripts relating to Ivan Schlosser, reviewing his confession of the murder of Heidi Duplessis, the high school girl from Bond Brook.

Why would someone deliver a voluntary confession?
was the question Vera had written at the top of her notebook page. Was there some kind of reward involved, real or imagined, in owning up to a crime that hadn’t been traced to him? Had Schlosser simply wanted to boast—to take credit for every one of his misdeeds? Looking over the transcripts of his interviews with Detective Leo Vachon, Vera could see no hint of remorse.

SCHLOSSER:
I didn’t know I was going to stab her until my knife was at her throat [LAUGHTER], but once I started I knew it was the right thing to do. Didn’t expect her to scratch up my arms like she did, though. She was a solid little thing. Big boobs, big shoulders. It took a few minutes before she went still. Then I took her into the bathtub and cut her up . . .

VACHON:
What did you cut her up with?

SCHLOSSER:
A tree saw.

VACHON:
This was a tree saw you already had or one that you bought?

SCHLOSSER:
It was one that was in the basement of my apartment. I think maybe it was the landlord’s. I never saw nobody use it. I know I never cut up a tree in my damn life. Just people.

Vera kept turning pages of the transcript, dropping them on the floor in haphazard piles that she would neaten up later. She read more details about the deaths of Schlosser’s two other young victims. They had not died exactly the way Heidi had died.

Vera had been only fourteen years old when Heidi Duplessis, a sophomore from her own school, had been forced out of the home where she was babysitting and murdered hours later in the woods. In the hierarchy of high school cliques, Heidi had been a moderately popular girl—a girl who wore expensive, preppy clothes and had a head full of spiral-permed curls. She was known for a ready smile filled with short, white, square teeth that flashed in the middle of her deeply tanned face. Heidi Duplessis, age fifteen: friendly, well liked, unthreatening, but still not someone who would have deigned to speak to Vera, even if their paths had crossed directly.

Heidi had been strangled to unconsciousness before she was stabbed, though one stab wound was ruled as her ultimate cause of death; with Schlosser’s other two victims, Margot Pooler and Rosemary Trang, he had skipped the preamble and gone straight to the stabbing. Though Vera knew that killers sometimes switched up their modus operandi, she also couldn’t lose sight of the fact that serial killers tended to like the consistency of patterns and that each new mode of killing had its reasons.

Vera also knew the strangler and the stabber had something in common. They didn’t mind demonstrating a sense of intimacy toward their victims. They were not afraid to get close. She thought about the papers she had just reviewed and dropped down on her hands and knees, sorting through the pile until she found the page with the passage she wanted to read again.

VACHON:
What else can you tell us about the murder of Heidi Duplessis?

SCHLOSSER:
Well, what do you want to know? It started with choking, like I said. I was holding her throat, and I moved in real close, so if you were looking at us from far away, you’d have thought it’s just a man and a woman about to kiss. But my intent was just to get a real good look in her eyes so I could see the life go out of them bit by bit.

Vera copied these exact words into her notebook and studied them, thinking.
Now this,
she told herself,
might really mean something. This might be put to good use somewhere in my Schlosser book.
But she was beginning to lose steam, now that the sun was threatening to come up. Two more hours before she had to leave for school, not enough to go back to bed but just long enough to grow weary before her workday even began.

She placed her head on her table, on top of her folded arms, and closed her eyes, still thinking of Schlosser’s confession. The words
just a man and a woman about to kiss
floated through her mind in the disembodied way that thoughts did when she was close to sleep.
I could make something of this,
she thought from this far-off place, but she knew she would not—not on this morning, at least. The hours never worked in her favor. And even if they did—even if there were finally time enough to begin to write what she wanted to write—something always got in the way of it. Her unfinished schoolwork waiting to be graded. Her lesson plans waiting to be drafted and finalized. Her own fears and doubts causing her to look at the reality of Schlosser like a child peeping through her fingers at something—something she knew she shouldn’t see but wanted to.

 • • • 

Vera considered herself a creature of habit—someone who came into her own once she’d carved out a routine for herself.

By the time three weeks of teaching at the Wallace School had passed, she felt as though she had begun to get her footing in her three classes and had developed an innate sense of the rhythm and pace she could expect from each set of girls. More important, she had a better handle on each girl as a result of reading her journal entries; she had seen each girl’s whole
being
emerge more vividly on the page, though some, of course, presented themselves with more powers of articulation than others. She had hoped that this would happen—that she would come to know them better and that they would come to trust her more, as the exchange of entries and comments grew.

What she hadn’t expected is that she would become the keeper of their secrets. That they would feel safe confiding in her.

Who would have guessed, Vera thought, that the beautiful Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey had been in two foster homes before being permanently adopted by a wealthy couple just three years before? And who would imagine that Aggie Hamada, who seemed to have a picture-perfect life, was tormented by her parents’ recent split—especially since her father had left her mother to take up with her baby brother’s nanny? Even Loo Garippa, so outwardly rebellious with her piercings and her eggplant-colored hair, confessed to taking mail-order diet pills that left her with headaches. (Vera had directed her to the school nurse, who was better equipped to handle this problem than she.) Although Vera knew as well as anyone that things were not always what they seemed, she still felt surprised by each new revelation, surprised that the girls would want to share such things with
her
.

She felt she owed her girls something, and she tried to repay their confidences by breaking up the boyish voice of Holden Caulfield with readings that offered a slightly more relatable (she hoped) female perspective; she assigned Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House,” excerpts from
The Pillow Book
, and Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll.” And when responding to students’ writing, she made it a point to scrawl a few kind words on each girl’s writing exercise—the simple acknowledgment that told them someone was listening.

The exception to this was Jensen Willard, who had yet to receive any written feedback from Vera. Though Jensen’s follow-up journal entries had been less disclosive than her first, they’d been no less revealing, in their own funny way; following her assigned reading of the essay “Hateful Things,” Jensen had written her own list of hateful things that beautifully spoofed the complaint list written by Sei Shonagon, the famed, opinionated courtesan of Japan’s Heian period. (“When you are about to make an astute point in class, and somebody else raises her hand to put out the obvious and takes the discussion in a stupid direction from which there is no return, that is hateful indeed.”) Vera had come to enjoy her contributions from week to week, but had not felt there’d been enough time to write the lengthy response she wanted to. A simple, supportive scrawl did not seem acknowledgment enough for Jensen Willard.

By the time the Monday of her fourth week of teaching rolled around, Vera’s classes had a decidedly different feel to them—the difference of attacking her days with a plan instead of flip-flopping between several possible ideas and instinctively choosing the one that felt right in the moment. On this particular Monday, she decided to start her morning class with a ten-minute freewrite on the subject of themes in
The Catcher in the Rye
.

“Now, theme,” she reminded them, stalking up and down the rows as the students opened their notebooks and rooted around for their pens, “is not always easy to identify before you’ve read a novel in its entirety. Still, I think what you’ve read from
Catcher
should have already provided at least a few hints about the book’s main idea. Take a stab at it. Any guesses are fair guesses.”

Minutes later, as Vera collected the freewrite exercises—waiting patiently as many of the girls took time to take the fringes off their notebook sheets, piece by scraggly piece—she began to talk about theme as it pertained to the novel they were reading. She spoke of loneliness, alienation, the desire for closeness to another human being, the preoccupation with what is real versus what is false—pausing to scribble each item on the board as she mentioned it. She felt she could not get her words out fast enough, could not write fast enough; what she really wanted was to hear what the girls had to say and to see the machinations of their minds.

“I thought one of the themes was about what happens when he doesn’t do well in school,” Kelsey Smith said. “How he goes down a
slippery slope
.”

“How
who
doesn’t do well in school? Make sure your pronoun references are clear.”

“Holden.”

“Thank you. I wouldn’t say that’s a theme exactly, but it’s an important plot point. What else? Any other ideas?”

Harmony Phelps raised her hand. “Guys are assholes. That could be a theme.”

“Is that a universal truth, though?” Vera asked. Some of the girls laughed, as though to say yes. “Don’t answer that just yet. I definitely do want to come back to the question of whether you think Holden is, well, an asshole, especially when we get to some of the later chapters. It may come down to a matter of opinion.”

“Some people might say that Holden is . . . what Harmony said he is . . .” Jamie Friedman said, “but others might think that it’s okay. Because he’s smart, so that makes up for it.”

“There’s different kinds of smart,” Martha True said timidly, from the back row.

It was all Vera could do not to look at Jensen Willard. She had a feeling the girl had no shortage of opinions on this subject. Vera’s eyes skimmed over her, resting at last on Martha in the back. “Do you think he’s smart, Martha?”

“I’d say he’s clever.”

Loo Garippa raised her hand. “I have a question. It might be kinda off topic.”

“Okay.”

“What is it with Holden and serial killers? I was looking on the Internet, and I guess serial killers really get into this book. I thought maybe you’d know the answer, with the book you’re writing and all.”

Vera could have sworn Jensen Willard was smiling demurely, eyes locked on the table. She was wearing another moth-eaten dress that had most likely been a rich black at one time but had dulled to the same charcoal color Vera had seen her wearing before. Over that, she wore an army coat that, by the looks of it, had once belonged to a fellow three times the girl’s size.

“That’s a bit of a misconception,” Vera said, “thanks to Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Reagan in the 1980s. Neither of whom was a serial killer, by the way—I suppose you’d call them assassins, or would-be assassins—but both of whom happened to like the book a lot.”

“But why?” Loo asked.

“It’s probably because Holden talks about wearing a people-shooting hat,” Chelsea Cutler said. “That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? He has this funny hat, and he’s running around his room telling his roommate or whoever that he shoots people in that hat.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Jamie said, in the sort of indulgent tone a mother might use to excuse a toddler with a biting problem.

Autumn Fullerton was stroking her hair as though bored. “He
might
mean it. You never know. Maybe later on, after the book ends, he
could
go on to kill someone.” Vera recalled that Autumn had read the entire book. This told her all she needed to know of what the girl thought of Holden.

“I know this might be controversial of me to say, but I’d submit that anyone could kill someone,” Vera said. “Anyone is
capable
. The only reason why most people don’t do it is because they’d feel guilt or shame if they did, and rightly so. The people who kill are those who have no guilt or shame. Personally, I think Holden has both. That’s why it’s unlikely he’d be capable of any serious violence. As you read more, you just might decide that he’s a kind person who’s capable of love.”

“Really? I don’t think he loves anyone but
himself
,” Harmony Phelps sniffed.

A flurry of responses rose over that, with several girls trying to outtalk one another—Autumn, Cecily-Anne, and Harmony the loudest of them all. Seeing that she’d opened the floodgates of healthy debate pleased Vera; the fact that some of the quieter girls in the class had jumped into the fray felt like a success of sorts, even if the discussion had steered toward dangerous waters. Vera wondered if she had been wrong to say what she had said—that
anyone
could kill someone. It seemed like one of those glib comments that wouldn’t hold up under logical scrutiny or, more distressing still, could be taken out of context:
Hey, Mom, do you know what my English sub said today? She said we all could be murderers!
Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to keep her interest in true crime out of the English classroom. But Loo Garippa had started it, not she.