What Has Become of You (16 page)

I’ve tried to explain what I see in him.

I try to explain to her that Bret and I have read some of the same books. That together, with our collective brain wattage, we could be a formidable force against the universe if we so chose. I don’t bother trying to explain to her that to me, he has started to look less like a baby egret or a sleepy-eyed tapeworm. His grotesquely scrawny limbs now look exotic and exquisite to me, like he’s the androgynous singer in a glam-rock band. (You probably think this is funny. It
is
funny, or it should be, but I can’t laugh about anything right now.) I guess I have grown to love him a little bit.

Who am I kidding?

I know I have grown to love him a lot. I should never have let this happen. Me, of all people.

I wish I mattered more to Bret. I wish I was the most important person in the world to him, the most beautiful. I wish I was this to someone. But I don’t want to be hurt by him anymore.

I didn’t tell my mom or Les about what Bret had told me, even though I talk to them about almost everything. I know what they’d say, if I did tell them. My mom would say, “Why would you get yourself worked up over a boy who’s not even done yet and is about as useless as tits on a boar-hog?” And Les would jump in with, “He’s an asshole! In my day, if I had a girl, I would call her every day, and if I couldn’t call, I’d mail a goddamn letter!”

I don’t think I could make my parents understand that I’m not crying over a boy. Not exactly. I am crying because of all this wasted time. My whole life so far, all fifteen years of it—just wasted time.

Vera blinked at that last paragraph. The phrase
wasted time
made her think of Sufia Ahmed—
the waste of a young life
, as the cliché would have it—and she wiped this out of her mind as fast as she could, like someone swatting at a fly, looking up at her former student’s smiling picture for forgiveness.

It was funny, Vera mused; Jensen Willard had complained in a journal entry that her peers were oblivious to tragedy and heartache, but Jensen was not so different—her tragedy seemed exasperatingly small compared to what Vera had seen in the earliest hours of Saturday morning. Still, her heart went out to her student, who presumably had written this entry before she had known of Sufia’s death. Her pain was still real, no matter what its cause, and deserved to be dignified with a response. She read the journal entry a second time, then a third time, and then she remembered more of how she had felt after she’d read Jensen’s last journal entry—the annoyance she’d felt at Bret Folger and at thickheaded boys of his ilk. And then she knew exactly why it bothered her—the reasons she had not wanted to consider, the stories she had deliberately refrained from telling Jensen before.

In a split-second decision, Vera hit the reply button and felt her fingers flying over the keyboard, hammering at the keys until they shook:

Dear Jensen,

I found your last journal entry far from stupid, so please do not worry about what I thought of it. My only objection to reading that entry is that your boyfriend, Bret, does not seem as sensitive to your needs as I would wish for you. Hearing about your relationship reminds me a little of how things were with my own first boyfriend. It may or may not be helpful for me to tell you something about this. I can tell you that I was seventeen at the time and that my first boyfriend’s name was Peter. Many years later, he became my fiancé. A few years after that, he became my ex. Before he was mine, he was the boyfriend of a girl named Heidi Duplessis. But that is a separate story, perhaps one for a different time.

Peter and I went to the same high school in Bond Brook, but had never spoken—kind of like you and Bret in the French class. I was shy, so painfully shy in those days that other students made fun of me, asked me if I was deaf and dumb, made goading comments in study halls while the teachers looked the other way. But Peter was someone I had noticed. I liked his pale, bleached white-blond hair that fell in a swoop over his forehead—its natural color was a medium brown—his short, compact body, and his black trench coat that flapped theatrically around his ankles when he walked. I liked the way he bounced on his the balls of his feet and the way his voice cut through the din of the halls. He was often smiling, but his eyes seldom smiled; they were an almost silvery blue, a color so seldom seen in nature that it was impossible to detect any warmth in them. In a diary I’d kept at the time—I’m embarrassed to even think about this diary—I included Peter in a list of “10 Boys I Would Like to Date,” with an explanation of why next to each person’s name. Next to Peter’s name I wrote, “He seems like a very unique kind of boy.”

But as I said, Peter never noticed me in high school. He went to Temple University after graduation, and we didn’t start dating until we ran into each other during his Thanksgiving break. By that time he’d heard some things about me, things that weren’t so nice, but still somehow we clicked.

On our first date, we went to a nightclub in Portland that had chem-free dance nights twice a week; the nightclub was like nothing I’d seen in Bond Brook, and I instantly fell in love with it.

Jensen, I wish such a club was still around for you. Zuzu’s was the name of it, and it was the place to go if you were a disaffected boy who wore makeup or a disaffected girl with a shaved head. This was the place to go if you were a pale, scrawny girl with Cleopatra eyes and a short dress and a pair of boots with four-inch soles; it was also the place to go if you were a great big girl spilling out of your corset, a crucifix nestled in your cleavage. Girls like this came from small schools all over Maine and had names like Scheherazade and Cymbeline. On the dance floor you could view hunchbacked kids, praying mantis kids, midget kids who moved like Tasmanian devils; some did leaps that raised them several feet in the air—you’d think they were figure skaters doing triple axels, but with flailing gestures added for dramatic effect. You should have seen them! There was one girl who always wore a white latex bodysuit and danced like she was fighting off a swarm of bees! I didn’t dance at all, and I half hated, half admired these kids’ wanton exhibitionism; I’d just sit with Peter at the back of the club, sometimes even sitting on the floor with our backs up against the wall, with the thump of the speakers catching my heart up and tossing it cruelly around. The DJ spun songs by the Cure (“Boys Don’t Cry”), the Smiths (“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”), and Siouxsie and the Banshees (“Cities in Dust”). During a lull, a slow song that just about cleared the dance floor, I felt a cool hand over mine. Peter’s. I looked at him sideways and saw a sheen in his silvery eyes that might have been emotion.

After that, Zuzu’s was always
our
place.

I am sure you are wondering at this point why I am telling you this. I am telling you this because I think perhaps you will have some understanding of what I experienced.

Over the remaining weeks of Peter’s break, we saw each other every day. I went from being a girl who couldn’t even speak to a boy to a girl who could have endless conversations with a boy while in bed with him, arms wrapped fiercely around him. I remember rolling around on the floor of his house while the hot air blew in through vents on the floor, tickling us. I remember him being so thin that his pelvic bones hurt me when we had sex—that was what Peter called it, “having sex,” though I secretly thought that “making love” sounded nicer. Maybe it’s just as well that you and Bret aren’t doing all that. The word
love
was never used between us, but on those nights at Peter’s house when we lay together—his mother was somehow
never
home—he would say, “I need you.” And I believed that he did. I had never felt needed before, except maybe as my parents’ daughter. I’d never felt anything other than laughable or expendable to someone close to my own age.

Vera stopped typing, aghast. What was she doing? She did not need to disclose all this to Jensen. She doubted the girl would even want to hear about her teacher in this context; what student would? Yet there was part of her that wished to go on, to tell her about how, when Peter had gone back to college halfway across the country, something inside Vera broke. She wanted to tell her how she had written feverishly to him every day—topping Jensen’s four or five letters a week to Bret—and how Peter wrote her letters in return, packets filled with clippings and comic strips and things he thought might amuse her. She wanted to describe how she had torn into these envelopes, tossing aside all the clippings to find what she really wanted—the letters, the words, some scrap of affection in writing. A simple “I need you, Vera” or “I miss you” had made her weep with relief.

After a hot, full, indolent summer together, when Peter was preparing to return to school for his sophomore year, he told Vera he thought she was too intense. That it might be best if they started seeing other people—and then, she presumed, he had gone on to do exactly that, for they didn’t speak again for another fourteen years.

In the interim, her life had not ended, as she had once guessed it might. She
had
gone on to do other things—things she was sometimes even proud of, which she supposed could be said of almost anyone’s life. Her life so far had been a series of peaks and valleys, steps forward and steps backward, with her graduate school experience and time in New York City being the highlight. She had had other relationships of a sort, but nothing that took. Ending up back in Bond Brook because of Peter just seemed like a hiccup in retrospect, an interruption of the good path she’d been on. She would never make such a mistake again. When she thought of Peter and his new fiancée, Betsy, all she could think was:
Betsy will never know the skinny, white-haired, silver-eyed boy with the trench coat flapping like bat wings around his heels.
She would know someone quite different. She was lucky, Vera thought, to know something quite different—to not be lured back by the false promise of having teenage love softened and made right.

Vera realized she was crying a little, the cursor still blinking near the text of her unfinished email. The blinking seemed disapproving, impatient; it made her wipe her eyes and delete the email she’d started, word by word. When the screen was empty, she started anew, her mouth set in a resolute line.

Hi Jensen—

It’s fine that you didn’t turn in more entries, as you have already gone above and beyond the call of duty by turning in so many pages early and writing them in such a thoughtful, original way. I’m looking forward to seeing more from you. And I agree—writing does help with difficult times. Try to enjoy the rest of your time off, and I will see you in class soon.

Sincerely,

Vera Lundy

 • • • 

School resumed on Thursday morning, the day after Sufia Ahmed’s memorial service. Vera had already put some thought into how she would address her girls when they came into her morning class; she had not spoken to them directly since before the tragedy. They would be expecting something from her, she knew. They would be looking to her and all the other adults at Wallace for cues of how to behave, how to carry on.

To Vera’s utter lack of surprise, most of the girls looked red-eyed, weary, and beaten down as they took their seats. She found that the comments she had rehearsed in her mind—the boilerplate script about loss and coping that Lucy Grivois had suggested all faculty deliver to their students—simply would not do.

“Tough times,” Vera said quietly when it seemed that the last of the girls had come in. “Tough times indeed.”

Jamie Friedman nodded at Vera, meeting her gaze in such an adult way that Vera felt an understanding pass between them.
We’re the grown-ups here,
the gaze seemed to say, and Vera did not object to this idea at all. She was not sure she was up to the task of being the only grown-up in the room.

“Do you guys want to talk about things?” Vera asked, looking from girl to girl. “Or are you all talked out?”

“All talked out,” Autumn Fullerton said wearily, fiddling with her hair.

Loo Garippa nodded in agreement. “No one’s telling us anything anyway,” she said.

Vera stole a glance at Chelsea Cutler, whose eyes, though focused on Vera, gave away nothing. Had anyone told
her
anything? “I don’t think there’s much to be told at this point,” Vera said to the girls. “There’s some . . . there’s some really sick people out there in society. That’s the only absolute fact we have to work on. And it will be hard—it will be hard to grasp that Sufia won’t be with us anymore.”

It was then that Jensen Willard came in, dragging her army knapsack by its strap. There was a grayish pallor to her skin, and she carried herself more stiffly than usual, as though her joints pained her. She took her place at the long table near the back. Normally, she sat one seat away from Sufia Ahmed, with one empty chair in between them. Now two empty chairs stood between her and her closest classmate, Aggie. In the small classroom, these two empty seats seemed a wide gulf separating Jensen from the rest of the girls. Vera found her eyes resting on the seat that had been Sufia’s.

Suddenly the dead girl’s face appeared before her again—wide-eyed, doleful, accusatory. Vera looked out at the eleven students sitting at the tables and felt something awful beginning to happen within her body, a hideous and rapid metamorphosis. A great, swollen, bloated thing—
panic
, she thought—was bobbing up from her chest to her throat like some gaseous old body in a swamp. Vera carefully sat down on the edge of the table at the front of the room, not trusting her legs to hold her steady, and at that exact moment Jamie Friedman cleared her throat. “I would like to say something, Miss Lundy.”

“Please do, Jamie.”

“I just wanted to share a memory I had of Sufia. I think sometimes the best way to deal with sadness is to remember something good.”

“Oh, I think that’s a beautiful thought. I think that’s very wise.” And Vera really did think it was, although beauty seemed far away from her right now; her voice, she realized, sounded as though she were being strangled. Just thinking that made her breath come more shallowly, and she held her elbows closer at her side so that her arms would not twitch. There was something comforting about this; she felt as though her arms were holding her rib cage in place, keeping its contents from spilling out.