Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  I swiveled, hunting the crowd of unfamiliar faces to see who had called my name. Microphones crowded into my face, and a bright spotlight mounted on top of a camera blared into my eyes. The faces blurred in an indistinct haze behind the glare, and I couldn’t see who had spoken.

  “Just a quote, miss, just a couple of words! Tell us what you think!”

  “I’m just trying to get to class,” I said, squinting against the lights.

  Father Molloy was pulling at my arm.

  “Aren’t you scared? Do you think it could be something inside the school itself?”

  “I . . . Everyone just wants everything to go back to normal. Excuse me.”

  Camera flashes exploded across my eyes and more questions were shouted, but I couldn’t tell them apart. I hunched my shoulders up to my ears, slouching under the protective arms of Father Molloy.

  “That’s it, that’s all, give her some room, please,” he bellowed at the press.

  We had to force our way through the wall of arms and legs and reporter notebooks and cameras, and when we finally reached the studded front doors, Father Molloy hustled me through them, whispering, “That was okay, you’re just fine. Just go to advisory. Okay?”

  I nodded, eyes wide, and the door slammed shut.

  Inside, the halls were eerily silent.

  I turned my back to the door and surveyed the length of the upper school hallway, usually teeming with girls in matching skirts, beehiving our way to our different lockers and classrooms in the complicated dance of early morning in high school. But today I noticed the flagstone floor, a huge expanse of slate darkened with a century of Old English polish. Thin winter light slanted through the pebbled glass of the classroom doors, glowing in the glass transoms overhead. Each transom was engraved with the quote from St. Joan that was our school motto: Il est bon à savoir. It is good to know.

  Here and there, clusters of girls huddled by wooden lockers, books clutched to their chests. Through the silence we could clearly hear the muffled bray of the press outside, crushing against the doors. Every few minutes the front door cracked open and another St. Joan’s student tumbled through, hair disheveled, gasping for breath and looking hunted and afraid.

  “Colleen . . . I’m Colleen, and feelin’ so loneleeeeeeeeeey! I’m Collleeeeeen, Colleen and feelin’ soooooo bluuuuueeee . . .”

  I smiled, feeling swept with relief.

  Deena.

  Deena was here somewhere, and she was making fun of me with a Patsy Cline song. I clung to this life preserver of normalcy, moving quickly down the vacant hallway to our advisory. I could hear each of my footfalls on the flagstone.

  When the door swung open, I saw that advisory was two-thirds empty.

  Jennifer Crawford was resting with her forehead on her desk in the back of the classroom, her hair a newly applied, deeper shade of shocking pink.

  But there was no Anjali.

  No Leigh Carruthers.

  No Elizabeth.

  No Other Jennifer.

  No Fabiana.

  I tried not to feel a surge of excitement when I noticed that Fabiana wasn’t there, but I couldn’t help it. Today was the day. I could work hard, and I could scratch a few hundredths of a point closer. I resolved to start my extra-credit paper for Ms. Slater in study hall that afternoon.

  Deena was there, and when she saw me, she smiled broadly and waved. I was always happy to see Deena, but today I could have run over and hugged her. So that’s what I did.

  “Hey, whoa,” said Deena, laughing. “What gives? It’s just Monday.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just I still haven’t been able to get Anjali on the phone, have you?”

  Deena and I had texted fast and furious over the weekend, and neither of us had had any luck raising Anjali.

  “No,” Deena said. “But look. If your mom were some big medical researcher, and some weird ‘Mystery Illness’ were breaking out at your school, don’t you think your mom would pull you out for a couple of days? Whether you were sick or not?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “My dad thinks that a lot of the girls they’re saying are sick are really just staying out of school as a precaution. He tried to keep me home today, too.”

  “So did mine.”

  “So the fact of the matter is, we don’t actually know how many of us are sick. Right? Even some of the ones who’ve been reported to the school could just be faking to get some time off.”

  Deena sounded so reasonable. I felt a knot untie itself in my shoulders that I hadn’t even known was there.

  “You think?” I guessed not everyone cared as much about maintaining her GPA as I did. Maybe not even Fabiana.

  “Totally.”

  I looked around the classroom. The bell had rung, but Father Molloy was still outside ushering students past the reporters.

  “Even so,” I said, “I’d feel a lot better if she’d just text me back that she was okay. I saw Jason at my Harvard interview.”

  “Jason!” Deena exclaimed. “Did he wear his grille? I hear Harvard really loves a boy with ice in his teeth.”

  I smiled. “No grille. A tie with tiny ducks, but no grille. But you know, she hadn’t been texting him back, either.”

  “Huh,” Deena said.

  Her confidence slipped a fraction, and I didn’t like seeing the flicker of doubt in her face.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

  “But there must be a reasonable explanation for it. Maybe she’s finally come to her senses and dumped him.”

  “They didn’t have a fight or anything, though.”

  The door opened and a girl walked in, but Deena and I didn’t pay attention until she sat down next to us.

  “Tzt tzt tzt HA—ha—ha—hello, girls,” said Clara.

  I actually jumped in my chair.

  Clara Rutherford smiled prettily at me. Her head was twitching, but it wasn’t too bad. Her ponytail looked perfect as usual. That’s hard to do when your head is always moving.

  “Hey, Clara,” Deena said. “How’re you doing?”

  “I’m—tzt tzt tzt—HA—okay, thanks,” she said.

  She let the verbal tics come, without seeming embarrassed about it or anything. How Clara is that? She can make a Tourette’s outbreak seem cool.

  “We were just talking about how many people are absent,” I said. “It’s kind of creepy, you know? It’s so quiet in here.”

  Clara looked around, nodding as though her suspicions were confirmed.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s—tzt tzt tzt—pretty serious, you know? Did you watch This Is Danvers this morning?”

  Deena and I both nodded mutely.

  Clara tapped the side of her nose. Her head jerked, and then she smiled.

  I looked from her to Deena and back again, not sure what she meant.

  Clara leaned closer. “Just you—tzt tzt tzt tzt—wait,” she said.

  Clara rose from her chair like Venus stepping out of the scallop shell and drifted over to her usual desk. No one was sitting in that corner of the room, so I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t just stay in Fabiana’s chair, with us. Deena and I stared after her for a second, and then turned to each other.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where’s Emma?”

  There’s one part I forgot to mention.

  The upper school dean had been fired.

  The truth is, I don’t remember when I heard that. I don’t specifically remember anyone telling me, either in a text or in person. I don’t remember if I got it from a teacher or one of my classmates. It was knowledge that I soaked up somewhere along the line that day, knowledge that wasn’t there when I arrived at school that Monday, and by the end of the day, I had it. It was fact.

  The nun who was upper school dean was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. No more blowing
into the microphone at upper school assembly. No more sitting in the office for a skirt rolled too high. She was gone.

  Knowledge of her departure came with certain theories attached about why she’d been fired, and who was responsible, and what it might mean. Something about the board of trustees, which was a mysterious entity at St. Joan’s Academy. Everyone knew they existed, and everyone knew they ruled with an iron fist, but nobody’s parents seemed to be one of them. It wasn’t clear who they were, actually. Theories had always abounded that the board consisted of prominent families from Danvers, and that getting onto the board was even harder than getting into the Essex Bath and Yacht Club if you were Irish.

  The phrase didn’t get out in front of it was bandied around a lot that day. That didn’t sound like a real reason to me, though. It sounded like a PR reason. What, exactly, was the upper school dean supposed to be in front of? A camera? The problem? The illness? The gossip? She was a watery, anxious nun who’d been a teacher before she was an administrator and who’d excelled at enforcing uniform requirements and needling the college guidance office about Ivy League acceptance rates. She wasn’t the kind of person to go on This Is Danvers and tell the world that the teenage girls at her exclusive private school were twitching and flopping like dying fish.

  In any event, after that happened, it became less clear who was in charge. After the dean was gone, the truth grew to be this fat, amorphous, uncontrollable, invisible thing. A monster stalking the halls of St. Joan’s, which we all were hunting but couldn’t see.

  INTERLUDE

  SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  MAY 30, 1706

  But I don’t understand. What did they hope to accomplish with this exercise?” Reverend Green asks me with a curled lip.

  “It’s a very old method, Reverend Green. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it.”

  “I was brought up to put my faith in God first, and then in science. Not in old superstitions and wives’ tales. They lead foolish people away from the truth.”

  I watch him with an appraising look. It’s so easy for him. Judging like that.

  “Be that as it may. They had Tittibe bake it into a biscuit, and then Goody Sibley bade John feed it to one of the dogs in the yard.”

  “A dog?”

  “A dog, yes.”

  “The illogic astonishes me,” Reverend Green cries, throwing his hands up to heaven. “Though I don’t know why it should.”

  “The illness had a preternatural cause. The doctor said so! Whyn’t they look for a preternatural solution?”

  “How on earth could they think feeding a urine cake to a dog would be a solution? You explain to me how such simple minds work, because I’ll never understand it otherwise,” he challenges me, ramming his fingertip into the top of his desk.

  “Well, as I understand it, there were two ways Goody Sibley thought it might work. First, it was thought that perhaps the illness, or charm, or whatever it was, might travel via our water into the body of the dog, and we’d be freed.”

  “Oh, freed. I see.” The Reverend’s voice has taken a sarcastic turn. I suppose I can understand why, given all I’ve said. There was no charm in me to pass away, nor in Betty Parris or Abby Williams either.

  “Or,” I continue, “the other thinking was that the dog’s munching the cake would reflect the charm on whoever had bewitched us. That it would cause the person pain, and so she’d be forced to set us free.”

  The Reverend watches me, wheels turning behind his eyes. “Now that’s interesting,” he remarks. “Having a small part stand in for the whole. Not as ignorant as I’d assumed. How did it turn out? Successful, I presume?”

  I glare at him.

  “We all stood out in the yard shivering, up to our ankles in snow, watching the dog devour the cake. When the dog was licking his chops and the cake was gone, Reverend Parris took hold of me and forced up my sleeve, to see if my arm were healed. But it wasn’t. The wound was as red and seeping as it ever was.”

  “It would be,” Reverend Green says.

  “Then he sent everyone away. He wanted to pray alone that night. But the word was out in the village. And the word on everyone’s lips was witchcraft.”

  Everyone is waiting. I watch people bustle about their business in the village, and to the untrained eye everything looks much the same. Pigs root in the streets, their fur crusted with frost. One day there’s a warming, and the snow goes soft and wet, dropping in chunks from the trees. That night, a freeze so deep that when we all awake the next morning, it’s like the village has been dipped in glass.

  A week or thereabouts has passed since Mary Sibley told Tittibe and John to make the charm, and now everywhere I go I hear whispers. I imagine I feel people’s eyes on my back, but the moment I turn, I see nothing. Heads are down, bent to their work. I’m greeted in my comings and goings as usual, but there’s some fear underlying the words. Like the normalcy is all just people acting in a play.

  A steady stream of gentlemen—ministers and magistrates and doctors and the town fence-viewer—tromp in and out of the parsonage, and if you pass close by, you can hear men’s voices in prayer. Women cluster in the parsonage’s hall, inventing reasons to be there. The first meeting day after the doctor’s failed visit, the minister exhorts us all most grievously. He blames the village. He has sensed the current of our wariness, sees it carrying him and Betty and Abigail further away from our care, and so he tries to swim back into our good graces by presenting us with evidence of our own moral debasement. He stands ready to forgive us on God’s behalf, if we’ll only repent.

  Reverend Parris is scared.

  One afternoon I’m in Ingersoll’s Ordinary with Betty Hubbard, who’s staying on in our house while Dr. Griggs attends to the girls in the parsonage. I’ve been sent there by my mother for supper with Betty and one of my younger brothers, and we’re at a table in the corner near the fire. It’s warm in the corner, and I push my coif back from my forehead, which is shining with sweat.

  “Let me see it,” Betty says.

  “No,” I say, holding my arm to my waist where it will be safe.

  My brother’s not listening, as he has told us that he thinks girls are poison, and he won’t eat off my plate either, and I can’t make him. I’ve given up arguing with him. At this point, I might secretly agree. Maybe girls are poison.

  “Come on, let me see,” Betty insists.

  I look around to ensure that we’re unobserved. The tavern is crowded, bachelor men bent together in one corner, families crowded around tables, babies wailing. I can’t see anyone staring. But I have that feeling that people are looking away the minute my eyes land squarely on them.

  “No one’s looking,” Betty Hubbard says, as though she’s heard my thoughts.

  I lay my arm on the table and pull up the sleeve, grimacing as I do so. The crust of blood on the welts has soaked into the linen of my shift, and pulling it free peels the new skin away. Betty leans in close and sucks on a tooth.

  “It’s still drawing,” she says.

  I nod. I dip my fingertips in my cider mug and dab the alcohol on the semicircle of punctures. It stings, and I grimace and pull the sleeve down quickly. My little brother watches with a wrinkled nose.

  “That’s foul, Annie,” he informs me.

  “Be still,” I hiss at him. “Or I’ll send you home without supper, and who d’you think Mother will believe, when you ask her for something to eat?”

  He sulks in silence.

  “Perhaps you should show it to my uncle,” Betty Hubbard muses.

  “But he’ll think I’m still bewitched.”

  “Aren’t you?” Betty asks, raising her eyebrows. “As ever you were before, I mean.”

  I grunt and swirl the cider in my mug, staring down into it.

  “He’s got Abby and Betty to attend to. I don’t know why Abby doesn’t just co
nfess.”

  “She’s right comfortable up there, that’s why,” Betty Hubbard says.

  Our food comes, roast pork with pickled apple, and we gnaw into it. There’s some singing in the Ordinary, and my brother beats time along on the table. We’re smiling, mouths greasy. I know my mother’s sent us out to get quiet in the house while my father labors over his account books, but I’m happy for it. It feels good to be among the other villagers, to feel safe and another face among many. To be warm while all outside is cold and barren.

  The door slams open midsong, and it’s my friend Mary Warren, the Procters’ girl. A gale blows around her skirts before she can get the door closed, earning her scowling from the table nearest the door and some conspicuous buttoning up of jackets. She spots us and hurries over. Eyes track her movement with curiosity, and I see a few heads lean to whisper in other ears.

  “Mary! Have you eaten?” I smile up at her, feeling warm and pleased that we can make a party of us four.

  “Yes, yes, they eat early.” Mary waves me off and sits on the bench next to Betty Hubbard.

  “Why, what’s the matter? You look frightened half to death,” Betty Hubbard says with concern. And it’s true, Mary’s face has no color. I feel my meal begin to curdle in my stomach.

  “I’ve just come from them,” Mary says. She never likes to name the Procters. She hates waiting on them as much as Abby hates waiting on the Parrises, but Mary’s a more godly girl than Abby, and keeps her complaints close. “Goody Procter’d heard a rumor in the town, and I just went to the parsonage to find out after it, and it’s true.”

  “What’s true?”

  Mary looks at my brother. “Go find Goody Pope’s boy, John.”

  My brother pouts.

  “You heard what Mary said to you,” I say, flicking him on the back of his wrist with my fingernail. He yelps.

  “But he’s not here!”

  “How d’you know he’s not here if you don’t bother to look?” Mary says.

  My brother gets to his feet, looking confused.

  “And don’t you come back ’til you’ve found him,” I exhort.