What Has Become of You (10 page)

Sincerely,

Vera Lundy

She had considered signing it, “Yours, Vera Lundy,” but decided at the last minute that that might be too much. She had said quite enough already, even while trying not to.

The first morning of her fifth week of teaching, Vera sat reading an online journal article called “Criminology and the False Confession,” written by a criminal psychologist named T. E. Rubin. It was still dark out—not yet 5:00
A.M.
—and her overhead light burned over her as she stretched out catlike on her bed, listening to the starchy calls of the chickadees outside her window, vocal and vigorous after a long and subdued night. The article stated nothing she didn’t already know, yet it struck her as especially resonant, the way a certain song heard at a certain time seems to hold all the answers to the world.

When the person making the false confession is delusional, the false confession becomes his reality. But in the case of the nondelusional confessor, the confession itself helps him to feel grounded in a reality that had heretofore rejected him. Taking credit for a crime often becomes a highly public action, one that the world responds to. The confession, then, becomes a misguided attempt at achieving intimacy between him and the rest of society.

It was interesting, Vera thought, to compare Ivan Schlosser’s ready confession (
Well, what do you want to know?
) to the initial false confession of Ritchie Ouelette. Had Ritchie, too, had a moment when he thought a confession might bring him closer to the world instead of further away from it, like a kid who seeks negative attention in a wrongheaded attempt to garner a mother’s love?

Looking up from her reading and tapping her pen meditatively against the page, Vera smiled to herself. She knew what she and her girls would be discussing first thing tomorrow.

 • • • 

“Intimacy,” Vera announced at the beginning of her first-period class. “Isn’t that a pretty-sounding word?
Intimacy
. Some people name their daughters Chastity. Why not name them Intimacy? It has just as much of a ring, doesn’t it?”

Clutching her library copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
, Vera paced the floor of the morning class, speaking of intimacy and how it related to Holden Caulfield’s fleeting desires to connect with the opposite sex. “What do you make of that behavior?” she asked her students. “What do you think is the driving force behind it?”

“Desperation,” Jamie said.

“Ah,” Vera said, giving Jamie a congratulatory little rap on her desk as she walked past. “Good answer. But what does desperation
mean
? Have you ever felt it? Tell me what desperation feels like.”

“It feels like . . . grasping at straws,” said Katherine Arsenault, who seemed to have roused herself from the dead at that mention of intimacy.

“Good, Katherine,” Vera said, and then remembered the way the girl had signed some of her recent journal entries. “Or do you prefer to be called Kitty?”

“I prefer Kitty.”

“All right then, Kitty. Why is Holden Caulfield desperate and grasping at straws in
The Catcher in the Rye
? What would make a sixteen-year-old boy feel so desperate?”

“Hormones,” Loo Garippa deadpanned.

“More than that.”

“Loneliness?” Martha True said.

“To say the very least, yes. Here he is, wandering around New York City alone, and he has no idea what to do with himself. Lost in his own hometown, practically.”

“New York City is a good place to be lost,” Jensen Willard said. It was the first time she had ever actually contributed a comment during class, and Vera irrationally found herself wanting to hug the girl.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Have you ever visited there, Jensen?”

The girl nodded. But the invitation Vera had thrown her way, this small encouragement to say more, fell flat, for she fixed her eyes on the table before her and refused to look up again.

“Let’s run with this idea of loneliness,” Vera said, turning away from Jensen and trying to ignore the tug of rejection she felt. “It’s such an important part of understanding Holden’s character. And isn’t it an important part of understanding the teenage experience, too? Isn’t it a lonely process, sorting out who you are emotionally and intellectually?”

There were blank looks, a couple of shrugs. Vera was not completely unsurprised by this noncommittal reaction. After all, what teenage girl wanted to be the first among her peers to own up to this idea of sorting things out?

“Funny thing about admitting that you’re lonely,” Vera said. “It’s like saying you’re depressed. People think it’s contagious. No one wants to be around you if you admit to loneliness or depression.”

She was killing the discussion. As though illustrating her own principle, the mere mention of the words
loneliness
and
depression
cast a pall over the room, an almost palpable recoiling. She knew she had better shift gears.

“Let’s talk about something else, then, that’s not so unrelated if you think about it: Holden as a liar. He’s always presenting himself as something he’s not. How does his tendency to lie or embellish tie into his loneliness? What might be the reason behind embellishing stories like Holden does? Do you think he’s trying to impress other people? Is it that he’s not happy with the real stories or perhaps doesn’t
know
the real stories yet? Either way, this goes back to what I said, about sorting things out intellectually and emotionally. And that kind of sorting-out process is the hallmark of adolescence itself, the key to coming of age.”

“Coming of age to do what, though?” Aggie Hamada asked.

“Get secondary sex characteristics,” Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey said primly.

“Be on the rag,” someone else said in a stage whisper.

Vera cleared her throat. “Come on now, girls. What are the motivations behind a lie? Think about it.”

After a few seconds, the answers began to come.

“To hide something?”

“To protect someone else.”

“To make yourself look good.”

“To fool yourself or others.”

“Good answers, all of you.” Vera was growing excited. She was scarcely aware that her pace around the classroom was quickening or that her low voice rose, rich and full-throated, in anticipation of the narrative she was about to tell.

“Let me tell you a quick story about a real-life adolescent who lived a lie for a little while. Any of you ever hear of Penny Bjorkland?”

Just as Vera had expected, no one had. She slowed her pace around the classroom, rubbing her hands together. She shot an almost defiant glance at Sufia Ahmed, who was sitting at her desk with her hand curled around a pen, ready to take notes.

“Penny Bjorkland was a seemingly ordinary teenager who lived in California in the late 1950s. One day she woke up and told herself, ‘Today is the day I will kill someone.’ That someone turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old gardener named August Norry, who had the misfortune of offering her a ride that day. She fired eighteen bullets into his head, torso, and limbs. When the crime was later linked to her gun, she seemed unapologetic. She was described by the cops as a typical, gum-chewing, ordinary teenager with a tendency to giggle. When asked why she had done it, she said she had wanted to know what it would feel like to kill someone and not to have to worry about it afterward.”

“Cree-
pee
, man,” Loo Garippa said. “That’s just weird.”

“I daresay it’s the
normalcy
with which she approached it that made it weird. This is a pretty extreme illustration of the adolescent’s weakness in decision making, planning, and impulse control. On a much lesser scale, one can certainly see this in Holden Caulfield. Almost everything he
does
is based on impulse.”

“But impulses aren’t always bad,” Cecily-Anne said, surprising Vera.

“No, of course not, Cecily-Anne. Can you think of a good impulse you’ve had recently?”

Cecily-Anne exchanged a glance with Autumn, and both of them giggled. Vera had the feeling they were laughing at her. “Well, I bought the Marc Jacobs bag I wanted,” Cecily-Anne said, “but it was a really good buy.”

Deciding to leave that one alone, Vera turned to the whiteboard and wrote down a word in large, slanting letters:
EGO
. She began to discuss what ego meant for the adolescent—how it represented the struggle of base, primitive urges against the expectations of society. The battle of what you
should
do versus what you
want
to do, deep down. There was a great, mushrooming silence that she interpreted as borderline hostile; she had probably used up the last of the students’ goodwill for the day. They probably once again wished they were back with their regular teacher, Mrs. Belisle, woodenly reading lines from
Macbeth
out loud. Feeling almost perverse as she did so, knowing the students were not warming to this topic, she ended by assigning them a freewrite on the subject of ego.

“Are you going to collect these?” Chelsea Cutler asked.

“Yes, I am going to collect them. Your responses will be part of our discussion next time we meet.”

Amid some noisy sighs and the sounds of loose-leaf paper being torn from notebooks, the girls began to write. Vera walked along the desks at the five-minute mark to check on the girls’ progress. Some had written only a couple of sentences; others had filled nearly a page and showed no signs of stopping. Jensen Willard sat quietly in her chair, her head bent over her notebook but her pen held slack, the sheet of notebook paper blank before her.

“Thinking?” Vera asked her in a low voice.

“I have a hard time with freewrites,” Jensen whispered. “I can’t just think of things on the spot.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered back to the girl. But perhaps it wasn’t quite fair to the others, allowing Jensen to just sit there while they worked. Her conscience getting the better of her, she added in her regular tone, “Just have it ready to turn in to me on Monday. Class is almost over now.”

A few minutes later, Vera told the girls to complete the sentence they were working on. “That’s all the time we have for today, but please—don’t leave without me collecting your journals. And please make sure you’ve noted the reading assignment I’ve put on the board. Thank you, and enjoy your weekend. Looks like I’ll be spending most of mine elbow-deep in reading.” Lest this sounded like a complaint, she added, “I can’t wait to see what you’ve written for me this week.”

As though by some mechanism, the students mentally shut off as soon as the words
That’s all the time we have
were out of her mouth. More than half of them were already out of their chairs, waving their journals in front of them; some were already dropping them on her table before she’d finished speaking. Amid this upheaval, Vera pretended to be intent on putting some papers back in her suitcase, all the while crouched on the floor in an awkward way, given that she was wearing an above-the-knee skirt. When she glanced up, she saw Jensen still in her seat, reading something with what looked like absorption.

When she looked up a second time, Jensen was gone.

Between the journal submissions and the freewrites, Vera’s first-period folder was now bulging with papers. She felt a mixture of anticipation and dread—dread because she knew that reading these works and composing her painstaking written feedback would be an exhausting undertaking. But what would she do, if denied that undertaking? She loved having too much to do. She no longer wanted to remember what it felt like to have empty weekend hours that left her feeling unmoored.

Watching the girls pass by in the hall, Vera opened the folder again and took out the first paper on top of the pile. It was Kitty Arsenault’s. Her previous writing samples had yielded nothing of interest, so Vera had no real opinion formed of her yet; she looked at the freewrite exercise in front of her and slowly picked her way through the spiky, messy, smudged penmanship that filled up most of the loose-leaf page.

EGO, by Kitty Arsenault

In THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, Holden is egotistical. He lies to make himself sound better, and he talks about himself constantly. I don’t think I am as egotistical as he is. Even when my teachers ask me to, I don’t really like writing about myself because I am not sure that I am that interesting really. I should probably tell more lies so that my stories will sound more interesting, but I’m not sure how to do that. I think I only lie when I’m trying to spare someone’s feelings. Like if someone gets a haircut and it looks awful and they ask me if it looks awful, should I tell them Yes or No? If they’re really sensitive, it doesn’t do any good to tell them “Yes, it looks awful,” because then they’ll just obsess over it and feel worse. And I don’t see the point in making people feel worse when I could make them feel better. I am not sure if I have done this freewrite correctly?

Vera smiled to herself, took out her pen, and wrote a few notes at the bottom of Kitty Arsenault’s journal.
Poor girl,
she thought—
nice and considerate of others, if a little dull. How lonely it must feel to be a nice, considerate, relatively ego-free teenager.

Next in her pile was Loo Garippa’s freewrite.

I think the idea of ego is pretty cool. Especially when you think about ego identity and how we add stuff to our personalities or take stuff away in order for us to figure out who we really are. Like Holden putting on that people-shooting hat and taking it off again. I guess my version of a people-shooting hat would be how I’m always trying to change up my appearance. My hair is purple right now, but I’ve had it blond, blue, black, and pink. I’ve had it buzz-cut, Mohawked, and dreadlocked. I’d like to get lavender streaks but first I have to wait till more of it grows back because I’ve fried it from dyeing it so many times. My dad always says: “How come you have to keep changing? What’s the matter with the looks God gave you?” But life is all about changing, and now is the time to do it, right? I don’t want to be an old lady of thirty still trying to figure out who I am or what looks good on me or what I enjoy doing. I’m glad this is a time for me to explore my ego identity.

Vera read the entry again, running her hand over her face. Not terrible—some of the connections Loo was making were decently observed—but it was not the sort of depth she had been hoping for. She decided to put this entry in the back of the pile until she could think of a suitable comment to write; she moved to the shorter entry on the next sheet of paper, only half covered in Sufia Ahmed’s looping script.