Conversion (6 page)

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2012

W
hen Dad dropped me off that next Monday, there was a news van parked on the cul-de-sac leading to the upper school building, and a woman in a bright purple suit and newscaster makeup was conferencing with a guy with a camera on his shoulder. Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate. It was a dull morning, not too cold, and the camera’s spotlight lit up the front of the school with a flat white glow.

“Huh,” Dad said, leaning forward to squint out the windshield.

“That’s weird,” I said from behind my travel mug of apple cider. The dregs are the best part, where all the cinnamon collects in the bottom.

“What’s going on? You know?”

“No idea.”

“Guess we’ll find out on the news tonight,” Dad said. “You walking home today?”

“Kinda cold. I’ll get a ride with Deena.”

“Great. See you at six.”

I hoisted my backpack into place and waded into the river of girls flowing toward the school doors. The reporter had been joined by Father Molloy, whose face looked gray and tired. The interview was already under way, but I couldn’t hear them over the sound of other girls chattering around me, cars pulling up, doors slamming.

When I finally drew near enough, I could make out the reporter saying, “But Father Molloy—”

“I’m sorry, but I really can’t say any more, and I can’t stress enough how important it is to give these families privacy. Thank you.” Father Molloy turned to the cameraman and added, “That’s it. We’re done,” while making a throat-slicing motion with his hand.

The spotlight snapped off, throwing the front of the upper school into Gothic shadow. The gargoyles perched on the corners of the building grinned down at us, tongues lolling. The reporter’s microphone drooped like a wilted flower.

“This is a crock,” she said to Father Molloy. The girls standing on either side of me giggled, and the priest scowled at us and turned his back.

“Well, I guess I can understand why you’d feel that way, but that’s all we’re prepared to say at this time,” he said, trying to keep out of our earshot.

“I think you’re really missing an opportunity here, Father. The community deserves to know what’s happening. They want to know that our children are safe.”

“Oh, give it a rest, TJ.”

TJ Wadsworth did the local morning show and reported for the evening news. She was usually assigned to cover human-interest stories, which in our town could be anything from trends in dog Halloween costumes to domestic violence and murder. Danvers is a funny place that way.

“We both know why you’re here,” Father Molloy continued. “And it has nothing to do with what the community deserves to know. You’re really a vulture, you know that?”

“We’re here to talk about the safety of teenage girls, Father Molloy. Or isn’t the church concerned with that anymore?”

The priest’s eyes flashed, and he took a step nearer to her, his hands in fists at his sides.

“Don’t you ever,” he hissed, “
ever
question our commitment to our students’ safety and well-being. Not while I’m present. Understand?”

TJ Wadsworth started to object, but Father Molloy had turned his back on her.

“Okay, girls.” He raised his voice and spun both index fingers in a let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road gesture. “Show’s over. Let’s get in and start our day, what do you say?”

Without waiting for our response, the priest stalked to the ornate double doors of the upper school and flung them open. We moved behind him, a sea of girls in matching uniforms, murmuring among ourselves and casting the occasional look over our shoulders at the reporter and her cameraman. “The kids have a right to be safe, Father! Any of you guys want to talk to us, just call the station!” she called after us.

But then the doors closed. And though they would talk about it, and they would speculate and reconstruct and imagine, no one outside of St. Joan’s would see what happened next.

“Colleen is sad and loooooonely, for her I cry, for heeeeeer, dear, onlyyyyyy . . .”

The haunting tune wafted its way down the hall, drifting over the heads of my classmates, echoing on the flagstone floor, resonating in the polished wood of the walls, and I grinned. Deena. This week’s song was “Body and Soul.” That song would worm its way into my brain, I knew it. Since it was Monday, I suspected she was already sitting in chapel, and maybe even saving me a seat.

The nuns who used to live and pray at St. Joan’s back when it was a convent belonged to an order that flickered out of existence sometime early in the twentieth century. We’d see pictures of them here and there in the halls, especially in the disused dormitory wing—framed black-and-white photos of serious girls in wimples all lined up in a row, with rope knotted around their waists, bleached almost white from time. I didn’t really know much about them, but Joan of Arc was their patron saint, and I heard that they died out in part because girls were required to join by the time they were fifteen.

The doors into the chapel were made of the same heavy carved oak studded with iron bolts as the front doors of the upper school, but the inside of the chapel was as narrow and light and airy as a medieval Gothic church. The light was flecked with bright colors, gleaming through the stained-glass panels that ringed the back of the ambulatory. In candlelight the whole chapel glowed like a jewel.

All of the stained-glass panels in the chapel showed images of St. Joan’s life. My favorite was the one of her on horseback, dressed in armor, her hair streaming behind her. She held the reins in one hand and a spear in the other, and her mouth was open, urging all the troops behind her onward into battle. Both of the horse’s front legs were drawn up, as though about to rear, his eyes rolling back in his head. I got shivers whenever I looked at it.

My least favorite was the one of Joan burning at the stake. The flames were made of these long shards of red and orange glass, and there were coils of smoke in black iron tracery all around her. But Joan looked different in that panel—her mouth closed, her hands bound before her, and her eyes looking up at heaven in this beatific way. Instead of her armor she was dressed in a white linen shift with a bow at the neck, like what a little girl would wear to bed. A crowd of people milled around her, their hands clasped in prayer, looking on with these fake sorrowful faces, as if they really wished they could do something but couldn’t be bothered. But Joan didn’t seem to mind. Her face was smooth and passive.

It pissed me off. I hated seeing Joan look okay with being burned alive.

“What’s up?” I whispered to Deena as I slid into the pew next to her. I realized that I’d missed Deena over the weekend. Emma was my best friend, but that was mostly because we had so much history together. I didn’t like to admit it to myself, but Deena and I had more in common.

She shuffled her coat and backpack out of the way and smiled at me. She’d changed up her dreads, weaving them into two heavy braids and pinning them behind her head like an Edwardian lady.

“Nothing much,” she said with a shrug. “Boring weekend. You?”

“It was okay, I guess.”

“How’s Jason?” Deena asked, in the mock-sighing way she used to make fun of Anjali.

“Two words sum up my experience of Jason this weekend. And those words are
track.
And
suit.
”

Deena threw her head back and laughed, clapping her hands.

“Yes!” she said. “My God, I love that boy.”

The sound in the chapel rose as girls filed in, each class pooling in their allotted section of pews, seniors on the front left, juniors front right, sophomores rear left, freshmen rear right, middle school in the upper central gallery, lower school flanking them in the choir gallery on either side.

Emma dropped into her seat next to me, nudging me with an elbow in greeting. I smiled back at her, but it was a habitual smile. She’d seemed pretty miserable on Saturday night. She sucked at pretending to have fun. Even Spence had thought so when we talked about it Sunday, and he didn’t even know her.

Anjali came huffing in just behind her, not looking up from her lightning-thumbs on her phone, and dropped into the seat on Emma’s other side. The sound of girls grew deafening, each squeal or chatter or footfall magnified by the echo off the glass windows and stone floor.

I didn’t see Clara Rutherford. Or the Other Jennifer.

“All right, all right, find your seats,” intoned the upper school dean, a gray-faced nun in practical shoes, waving her hands like someone trying to conduct an orchestra that hadn’t rehearsed.

Teachers picked their way to seats among the various classes, choosing them seemingly at random, though the careful eye could discern that they chose spots next to known troublemakers. The sound in the chapel lowered to a simmer.

“NOW THEN,” the dean said, too close to the mic.

A squeal of feedback whined through the sound system and we all flinched, some of us putting our hands over our ears.
“OW-UH!”
a small girl’s voice echoed in the choir loft. Someone else said,
“Shhhhh!”
and she settled down.

“Now then,” the upper school dean tried again.

“Mary, pray for us. Amen.” A quick cross of herself, and those of us who were Catholic followed suit. “As you can imagine,” she continued, resettling her glasses on her nose, “we have some important announcements, so I’d like to get started right away. You all probably noticed the news van at the front of the upper school when you arrived this morning.”

She scanned our faces, waiting. No one spoke.

“Well, the first thing is that we urge you to avoid speaking to the press. I know they can seem awfully friendly, and it’s very exciting having someone with a camera want to talk to you, but we don’t need to be airing any of our private business to them. You are all young ladies of St. Joan’s, and one of our school precepts is to behave with honor, both in public and in private. It’s part of the pledge you all sign at the beginning of the school year, and this is the kind of situation in which I would ask you to remember what you’ve promised. There’s no need to speak with anyone outside of school and your families. Just ignore them.”

Soft murmuring circulated in the pews. Deena and I exchanged a look. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Emma gazing at the chapel ceiling, lost in her own thoughts. Her eyes glimmered in the candlelight.

“Now, because I don’t want any of you to be concerned, I’ve asked Miss Hocking to say a few words that will clarify the situation and hopefully put your mind at ease. Miss Hocking?”

The school nurse had pulled her hair back into a chignon to make herself look more serious and had procured a white coat. She always used to wear those casual nurse blouses, the ones that come with teddy bears and stuff on them. But now she was straight-up white-coated.

“Good morning, girls,” she said.

Part of me thought that though she looked serious, it was an artificial seriousness. It looked like she was trying hard not to enjoy herself.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard what happened to a couple of our seniors last week. Now, first of all, I want you to know that I’ve talked with the families of all three of the girls, and they’re all doing just fine.”

A frisson of excitement thrummed through the pews. Deena and Emma and Anjali and I exchanged quickly mouthed confusion:
Three? I only knew about Clara and the Other Jennifer. Who’s the third? Three? What is she talking about?
All around us blue phone screens flipped on, and thumbs started to move.

The thrumming didn’t abate until the upper school dean stood up and bellowed, “LADIES. Your attention to Miss Hocking, please!”

Phones slid back into sweater sleeves and voices quieted down.

“As I was saying. They’re all doing just fine, and they’re expected to be back in school later this week. So I don’t want any of you to be concerned. For those of you who were present when your friends fell sick, we know it was scary, and I just want to reiterate this very important fact: they are just fine. There’s nothing to be concerned about. If you have any questions about what’s happened, now’s the time.”

We all paused, looking at each other. Then Leigh Carruthers’s hand shot up. Of course.

“Miss Carruthers,” the upper school dean called on her.

“Yeah, sorry, who’s the third one?” Leigh called out, and we all murmured our assent in wanting to know.

The nurse and the dean exchanged a look, and the nurse leaned into the microphone to say, “Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to say. Confidentiality. Are there any other questions?”

A hand in the center gallery shot up, from the seventh-grade section.

“What do they think caused it?”

“That’s a good question,” the nurse said. She glanced at the upper school dean, who shook her head.

“As far as we can tell, all three of the girls go to the same pediatrician. At this point we think they may have gotten some vaccinations at about the same time. It’s possible that they had a slight allergic reaction to a preservative in the vaccine. It’s not a big deal—people have allergic reactions to vaccines all the time. The important thing is, they’re going to be fine.”

Almost-audible cries started going up among us, cries of “I just went to the pediatrician, like, last week!” and “I totally felt light-headed in biology on Friday.”

Another hand shot up, this time from within the junior class.

“Could you tell us what signs to watch out for? I mean, if it’s so common. What if more of us have it?”

Another look passed between the dean and the nurse. Miss Hocking cleared her throat.

“Well, first of all, I’d say that there’s nothing for any of you guys to worry about. If you feel slightly off in any way, you’re always welcome to come see me in the nurse’s office.”

“But what, exactly? Not all of us were there,” the junior pressed, to supportive calls of “Yeah, tell us.”

“You should feel free to come see me for anything at all, of course. But, let’s see. Definitely come by if you feel faint, if you pass out for any reason, if you experience any unusual discomfort in your limbs, like tingling or twitching, if you have any trouble controlling your mouth or your speech. You should definitely feel free to—”