What Has Become of You (7 page)

At the end of class, Vera practically had to yell over the girls: “Please note the reading assignment on the board. And don’t forget, I’m collecting journals on Friday—at least two entries from each of you.”

Every class, Vera knew, had its regular latecomers and those who were slow to leave at its close. She had come to expect to see Jensen lagging behind the others, but Sufia Ahmed, who was usually eager to get on her cell phone and out the door as soon as class was dismissed, was not one who tended to stay behind. On this day, however, she remained in her seat, hands folded, studying Vera with her large, grave, liquid eyes while the other girls gathered their things and left. The class was empty except for her and Vera and, of course, Jensen, who was bent over tying her bootlace, the muddy sole propped against the chair where she’d sat.

“Miss Lundy, I would like to speak to you,” Sufia Ahmed said in her soft voice. Vera had to step close to her just to hear her.

“Yes, Sufia, what is it?”

“What you said today? I do not think it is right.”

Here it is,
Vera thought—
a moral dissenter at last.
“Are you referring to my comment that anyone can murder someone?” Vera asked gently.

“Yes,” Sufia said. “And I do not think such things are right to talk about in class.”

“I absolutely don’t mean to be offensive to anyone. Please bear in mind that my opinions are just my opinions; you’re encouraged to think critically, to question what I say. But what is right and wrong for
me
to bring up in class is my determination to make.”

“I am here to learn about the literature of America and of Europe, the great literature of all the world. I am not here to learn about killing. Killing was one of the reasons my parents fled their country.”

Vera nodded, shutting her eyes for just a fraction of a second. She could not help but feel a pang in her heart, hearing Sufia’s words. “I understand what you’re saying,” she said after a moment’s pause. “But the dark side of human nature is something that is represented in much of the great literature you will read. You really can’t escape it.”

Sufia shook her head slowly from side to side, her large eyes sad. “I do not think you understand. You say you do, but I don’t think you do. These things you say in class—maybe I will ask Dean Finister if it is okay for you to speak of such things.”

“Oh, Sufia. I’m so sorry you feel this way, I really am. Do you have some time to talk this through? I don’t have another class for a while yet.”

“I have my American foreign policy class now.”

“Can we schedule some time to talk later, then?”

“I will think about this,” Sufia said, and she turned and seemed to float out of the room, as she always did, with her light, precise walk and the hem of her traditional Somali dress rippling behind her.

Vera rubbed her eyes as though to clear them of something she wanted to be rid of.
Well, now you’ve done it,
she thought, and tried not to think about the greater implications of this encounter with her student. Surely Sufia would forget all the day’s class discussion before she could even think of reporting it. Vera knew how mercurial kids were, changing their moods and whims on a dime. But what if she didn’t forget? What if Vera’s careless comments made their way back to the dean?

Vera wondered if Jensen Willard, who was finally moseying toward the door, had been listening to the whole exchange. If so, she decided not to let on that she knew. There were other matters to discuss, long overdue. She closed her eyes again and counted to ten, knowing that the girl would still not have passed through the door by the time she had recollected herself. “Jensen?” she said. “Could I speak to you for just a minute, please, before you go?”

The girl came and stood by her chair with about the same gusto with which one might approach a firing squad. Leaning in toward her and speaking in a near whisper, Vera said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you for a few days now—there’s a reason I haven’t returned any of your journal entries. I want to hang on to them a little longer so I can write some decent comments on them—give them the response they really deserve. But on the whole, I’m impressed with them. Really impressed.”

“Thanks,” Jensen said, looking a little surprised. Surprise was the first glimmer of any emotion that Vera had ever seen her display.

“While you’re not writing
exactly
what I had in the mind for a
Catcher
journal, I want you to keep doing what you’re doing.”

“I can make it more about the book if you want. More of a literary analysis.”

“If you can work in a bit more analysis, that’d be great. But I’m really pleased with how you’ve started.”

“I have more,” Jensen said.

“More?”

“In my bag. I didn’t know if you’d want this today or not.” The girl reopened her knapsack and withdrew another bundle of pages, bound as before. “I might have more entries for Friday, too. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” Vera said. “If you write the pages, I’ll read the pages. However many you’ve got.”

“Some teachers don’t like to do that. They don’t want to read extra.”

“When the quality of the writing is as interesting as yours, I don’t mind at all. There’s just one thing I’d like to caution you about.”

A look crossed Jensen’s features, and Vera did not know how to translate it at first. Was it recognition—the look of one who had known that, sooner rather than later, the other shoe would drop?

“It’s nothing bad,” Vera said hurriedly. “I’d just like to ask you to be careful when writing about your classmates. And I’m not saying this for the reason you might think. It’s not because I’m trying to
censor
your right to discuss your fellow classmates in your journals.”

“But you’d rather I wrote nicer things about them.”

“No, not even that. I’m just concerned that someone might get a hold of your journals and . . . use them against you. You see, this happened to me once, back when I was in high school and had a tendency to write down every little thing that I thought. A notebook got stolen out of my bag in homeroom. I got in a lot of trouble for some of the things I wrote. I’d hate for . . . I’d hate for such a thing to happen to you. That’s all.”

They sized each other up for a second or two. Vera searched for a way to shift the conversation to Jensen—perhaps something specific about the journals she’d read, something to demonstrably show Jensen that she’d read it and
gotten
it. She blurted out, “I liked that bit you wrote a couple of weeks ago about Holden’s mother not making meat loaf.”

Jensen grimaced. “That was kind of a throwaway. I had to end the journal entry somehow.”

“Well, it amused me. And it certainly brings to mind the class issues in the novel. Holden is well-to-do, by most people’s standards. I’ll tell you a funny little personal story. One time when I was in a graduate school seminar, I made a passing reference to how much I’d enjoyed eating TV dinners when I was a kid—are they even called TV dinners anymore?—and my classmates, some of who were trust fund kids, were all agog. One girl said, ‘Vera,
really
? You used to eat TV
dinners
?’ They couldn’t conceive of it.”

Jensen’s mouth moved a little—not a grimace this time but not exactly a smile, either. Vera had the distinct feeling that the girl thought she was being silly but was too polite to say so. “I think you’ll like my new journal entry then. I actually wrote about . . . um, the haves and the have-nots, I guess you could say.“

“Sounds promising,” Vera said. “Very good, then. I’ll see you tomorrow in class, yes?”

“You will,” Jensen said. But now she seemed to have forgotten that she’d been on her way out the door. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and said, “I don’t think you did anything wrong, by the way.”

“I’m sorry?”

“With what you said in class. If anything, you might have even copped out a little. Don’t worry about what Sufia thinks.”

“I appreciate you backing me up on this,” Vera said, “but I respect what all of my students think and feel. I know that I
try
to, anyway.”

After Jensen was gone, Vera put her journal on top of the unread freewrites. As she was sorting the rest of them, trying to take her mind off all that had occurred after her last class, Sue MacMasters, the head of the English department, walked past her classroom, did a double take, and stuck her head in the door.

“Why, hello, stranger,” she said, her words curling around Vera in a way that felt like an accusation. “How is everything going? I haven’t heard much from you, so I assume you haven’t had any questions.”

“I think things are going well. We’re already discussing
Catcher
. The students seem to tolerate me all right.”

“I’m sure they tolerate you. They have ways of letting you know if they don’t. I’m on my way to a conference with a parent, but please—don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything. I know filling in for someone else can be rather overwhelming at first. I was just saying the other day that I’ve yet to see you come into the faculty lounge. You’re a bit of a mystery among the teachers.”

“Well,” Vera said wryly, “it’s good to know I have some mystique.”

She was grateful that Sue couldn’t linger. The brief attention from her boss had made her more self-conscious than ever. She knew she would have to buck up and start mingling with the other faculty at some point if she wanted any hope of having her contract renewed in the fall. But she was starting to feel, already, that forming close bonds with the faculty would somehow be traitorous to her students. Her first loyalty was to them. The side she was on would most likely always be theirs.

She returned her attention to the freewrites stacked before her. There was an hour-and-a-half gap between her first and second class—plenty of time to read and comment on some of these. One student, Chelsea Cutler—not the brightest bulb in the class, Vera had quickly ascertained—wrote about how the theme of
The Catcher in the Rye
is “the 1950s, where people talked different and thought different, which shows how no one can relate to them anymore.” Another student, Katherine Arsenault—Vera noticed she had signed her name
Kitty
—had written, “Holden is someone who takes everything for granite. I think this book is about not taking things for granite.” Applying a quasi-feminist analysis, Harmony Phelps wrote, “This is about how guys objectify women and tell lies and try to say they’re something that they’re not. Men cannot help it.”

Enough, Vera thought. She would have to get to these later. She pulled out Jensen’s journal entry. As with the girl’s first submission, the title on the cover gave her a little jolt.

I Shoot People in This Hat: Journal Entry #2, by Jensen Willard

Yesterday morning, before English class, we had an assembly in the auditorium. Were you there? I looked for you.

Vera stopped reading and pushed the paper away an inch, like someone who has resolved to not take another bite from her plate. This direct address took her off guard. But curiosity got the better of her; she pulled the paper closer to her again and continued reading.

I know our class talked about themes in
The Catcher in the Rye.
One of the themes is artifice vs. reality—the real vs. the phony—and I mention this because school assemblies are exercises in artifice. I kind of wish one of Holden’s cronies had been there to let out a colossal fart during the proceedings, just to keep things real.

FACT: Getting a bunch of girls together in an auditorium is offensive to the senses. The whole room reeked of Coco Mademoiselle perfume—the fragrance most of the girls here wear. Same fragrance their mothers wear, come to think of it. Little miniatures of their parents these kids are. You can look at them now and see what they’ll be like in ten years, in twenty years. They’ll be exactly the same, except with more money and more bloat. They’ll take positions in local government and build tennis courts in their backyards and complain about neighbors with unsightly, unmowed lawns.

It’s the same way with the poor white kids on other side of the river, identifiable by their scruffy pseudo hip-hop clothes and baggy pants. Their futures are just as clearly mapped out, but unlike the rich kids, sometimes I think they know how depressing this is. They take Vocational and General and Remedial classes and, whether they make it out of high school or not, will soon crank out litters of sad, doomed, government-funded children—just what we need more of. I know of which I speak, because I’m a poor white kid, too. I live on that side of the river and used to go to their school up until last year. I’m a “scholarship kid” now. Aren’t I the special one.

I’m not doing a very good job of setting the scene for the morning assembly, am I? I get distracted easily. I guess I could tell you how the dean of our school, Mr. Harold Finister, was up onstage doing his usual pointless shtick, handing out some leftover awards that he didn’t get around to handing out earlier in the year. If it seems as though I have some bitterness toward Dean Finister, then you are reading this the right way. Earlier this year, thanks to Finister, I had to meet with this shrink and almost ended up in a hospital. This is not the kind of thing I can easily forgive.

Finister’s big thing is keeping an eye out for girls who have alcoholic parents or are using substances themselves; he’s always checking our eyes for signs of drug-induced pupil enlargement. He can’t rag on me for substance abuse, so his thing with me is harping on depression. Every time he sees me he says, “You look sad today, Jensen.” Every frigging time without fail. It’s my own fault, though, because a couple of months ago he found me crying in the corridor, leaning against the wall because I thought I might collapse from crying so hard. I go on crying jags a lot, especially lately, and once I start I can’t stop. He hauled me into his office because I guess it’s bad if a girl sees another girl bawling unreservedly in the halls; it’s either an eyesore or it’s bad for morale, I’m not sure which. I sat there in the chair across from him and couldn’t stop crying, and finally he handed me a Kleenex. “You’re makeup’s getting all smudged,” he said. That was all he said at the time.