What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  “Is it about that murder that happened here last month?” Loo persisted. “Angela from the middle school?”

  “She was Finister’s niece,” Harmony Phelps said. “I mean, his niece by marriage.”

  “Who is Finister?” Vera asked.

  “The dean,” several of the girls chorused. Vera could almost read their minds: Who is this woman, this so-called teacher, who doesn’t even know who our dean is?

  “Oh, of course. Dean Finister. I knew that.”

  The girls seemed truly engaged now, sitting up straighter, eyes lighting up as though someone had snapped the cord of the shade that had obscured them. “My aunt works with the police force,” Chelsea Cutler said, puffing out her full chest by another inch or two. “She worked on the Angela Galvez case. She helped arrest the guy who did it.”

  “This is an older case I’m writing about,” Vera said. Sit down, she told herself. Look casual. She stopped in her tracks and lowered her behind onto the table at the front of the room; as she attempted to cross her legs, the table pitched forward an inch, almost depositing Vera on the floor. Recovering as the table steadied itself, she pulled her skirt down lower over her knees and said, “But isn’t that a shame, what happened to that little girl?”

  Some of the students nodded, and she felt that they wanted to talk about this; she saw this as her first possible point of connection, her first opportunity to get through to them.

  “She was strangled,” Aggie Hamada said soberly.

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s so. I read all about that.”

  “I heard the guy they’ve got in jail now might not be the one who did it,” Harmony Phelps said. “There’s this guy who drives around town trying to pick up girls in his car so he can rape them. But nobody’s caught him yet.”

  Chelsea turned to face the girl in the row behind her. “Are you saying my aunt got the wrong person?”

  “I’m not singling her out. But you have to admit, the police can be pretty sketchy.”

  Vera could see that Harmony’s retort was about to take this tangent to a potentially uglier place. She quickly got off the table and reached for a stack of handouts; she tried to ignore the dejection on the students’ faces as she cleared her throat and distributed the lesson plan that covered the remaining twelve weeks of the school year.

  “Getting back to business,” she said, “I understand you’ve just finished Macbeth. As Mrs. Belisle must have told you, the next few weeks are largely going to be spent reading The Catcher in the Rye. Does anyone happen to have her copy of Catcher with her today? Please forgive me; I tend to refer to it as Catcher just as shorthand.” None of the girls said a word, though Vera saw copies of the books on several girls’ desks. She picked up the copy on the desk of the girl nearest her—Kelsey Smith—and held it up for all to see. The book trembled a little in Vera’s hand. “This is Catcher,” she said, “and you should definitely all have it with you in class tomorrow. Has anybody read it before?”

  Two hands went up: Jensen Willard’s and that of one of the tall modelesque girls—Autumn Fullerton, Vera confirmed, sneaking a glance at her roster again. “Autumn,” she said, returning the copy of Salinger’s novel to its owner and moving toward the tall girl’s seat, “if I asked you to tell the class what the book is about, in just a few words, what would you tell us?”

  “Um,” Autumn said. “It’s about a boy? I think he’s sixteen? The book was written a long time ago, I guess, and the book is mostly just him talking.”

  Vera glanced at Jensen Willard in the third row. She could have sworn she saw the girl give an eye roll, but when she saw Vera looking at her, she glued her eyes to the desk. Vera had been about to ask her to put in her own two cents about Holden Caulfield, but something in the girl’s demeanor made her think better of it.

  Vera turned around and wrote the words NARRATIVE VOICE on the whiteboard in large letters. “Narrative voice,” she said. “Did Mrs. Belisle talk to you about what this is?”

  “A narrative is a story,” Jamie Friedman offered.

  “That’s right. It’s a story. And what does voice mean, in terms of writing? What is a writer’s voice? Could you define that?”

  Vera felt as if the students were already growing tired of her. She could practically read their minds; if she wasn’t going to talk about something interesting like homicide, then they wished she would just present a lecture and quit bugging them with questions. “Let’s think of it in terms of singers,” Vera went on doggedly. “If I asked you to listen to snippet of a song by, say, Mick Jagger”—Jesus, I hope they know who Mick Jagger is, Vera thought, and why do I have to use words like snippet?—“chances are you would be able to recognize him right away. His voice is that unique and that distinctive. It is as individual as a fingerprint. It has a . . . well, a classic rock swagger to it. One of the first swaggering rockers of that particular type, really. Each of you probably has your own singing voice, good or bad. You have your own unique writing voice as well.”

  Vera went on, trying to explain and illustrate the concept of narrative voice and why it is important. Most of the girls seemed to be actually listening, which emboldened her a little. Then Harmony Phelps’s hand went up again. “Mrs. . . .” She looked at the board. “Lundy?”

  “I’m a Miss. Yes, Harmony?”

  “Why do we have to read a narrative about a teenage boy? We’re all females here. I think it would be more valuable for us to read about a girl. We already just read about a bunch of guys, in Macbeth.”

  “Lady Macbeth wasn’t a guy,” one of the girls said.

  “Well, the whole thing felt very masculine. It was all about masculinity,” Harmony said, and then added virtuously, as though this explained it all, “It was Shakespeare.”

  “Yet as I understand it, the writing assignments you did in relation to Macbeth were about yourself.” Vera was pacing the room now, her arms wrapped around her rib cage as though she were cold. “You wrote journals and personal essays about subjects like rivalry and ambition and the tragic hero, and you applied these themes to your own life. It will be much the same with Catcher, though the themes will be different, of course. I’m going to ask you to work on your first journal entry tonight after you read the first four chapters of the book. In general, unless I specify otherwise, I will be collecting your Catcher journals every Friday. We’ll be taking breaks with other readings, too, so when the subject of the journals changes, I will let you know in advance.”

  The inevitable peevish riot of questions followed. How long does each entry have to be? What is it supposed to be about? Does it have to be typed? When Vera said that the journals could be about “anything,” some of the students seemed pleased while others looked deeply unhappy. Glancing at the clock, Vera saw there was a little extra time left in the class—maybe seven minutes. Panicking a little, she picked up her copy of The Catcher in the Rye and said, “Let me read the beginning bit from the first chapter aloud. If you have your books with you, you can read along silently. This first paragraph alone sets the tone and establishes the voice. It’ll give you a flavor of what’s to come.”

  And then, at last, the class was over. Before Vera had even finished reading, the room began to fill with the decisive sound of book bags being repacked and girls pushing their chairs back from the tables. Jamie Friedman smiled at Vera as she headed out—Jamie Friedman, she thought, was a wise, calculating girl, knowing how to cater to adults. Such a girl might be useful to have in the classroom. The two model-y girls lingered behind, conferring with each other about something, and Jensen, who had showed up in class last, was also last to make any signs of leaving it, slowly packing her school things into a large army knapsack that had symbols written all over it with a Sharpie. Coming over to the girl’s seat, Vera said, “Jensen, I got your email. I’m sorry I didn’t respond, as I saw it kind of late. It’s fine for you to use that other edition of Catcher. Thank
you, though, for checking in.”

  “Oh,” Jensen said. “You’re welcome.”

  “Maybe you’ll find it to your advantage that you’ve already read the novel.”

  The girl looked her in the eyes briefly. Her eyes were not a dark brown, as Vera had guessed they would be, but a dark amber color. The amber-colored eyes, along with her dark hair and pale, lightly freckled skin, made a pretty contrast, though Jensen wasn’t what most people would consider pretty. “Maybe,” she said, and she hoisted her knapsack over her shoulder. Then, without looking at Vera: “Do you mind if I ask you a question? It doesn’t have to do with the homework.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You said you’re writing a book. How do you do that—I mean, how do you go about writing a book?”

  With a self-deprecating little laugh, Vera said, “Oh, I’m afraid that would take days to explain, if not weeks or months.”

  “I guess I mean . . . how do you go about writing a crime book? What made you decide to do that?”

  Vera twisted her mouth, thinking. Unconsciously, she began rubbing the fat pads of her thumb and forefinger with her other hand. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know if I can speak to writing technique or method here, but I can speak to the why. It’s because of my rather idealistic desire to see things end as happily as they can. To see justice done. To see the bad guys caught and the good guys cleared and the victims’ families given the peace of mind that they deserve.”

  “No other reason?” Jensen asked.

  Vera looked at her again. Was there something owlish in the girl’s gaze—some hint that at any moment she might cock her head, spread her impressive wingspan, and swoop? No, thought Vera, looking again into her placid, amber-colored eyes. She’s a sweet girl, that’s all. A sweet, albeit strange girl—not that there’s anything wrong with strange. “There are always other reasons,” she said.

  “I thought so,” Jensen said. “Thank you for answering. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

  Alone again and feeling nettled for reasons she couldn’t explain, Vera shook her head and sighed. Jensen was a peculiar sort of girl, but she would surely not be the only peculiar girl she’d meet today, Vera thought. There were two more sections to teach before her day was over—essentially a repeat of the morning’s performance. She hadn’t had a spectacular start, but it hadn’t been terrible, either, she thought, trying to view it in a glass-half-full kind of way. She should be thrilled that it had not been worse.

  Nevertheless, she felt a flutter of disappointment she had not expected to feel, and it took her a moment to place where this disappointment came from. She had hoped to get a sense that the girls might like her. She had not really gotten this sense. Surprising, to realize this hurt a little.

  Chapter Two

  Having completed her first day of teaching—having reviewed, critiqued, and second-guessed it dozens of times—Vera found the early-morning class was stuck in her mind. She thought of the two willowy girls, Autumn and Cecily-Anne, their swan-like necks bent toward each other; of contentious and political-minded Harmony scowling under her knitted cap; of quiet Sufia Ahmed with her great, dark, liquid eyes; and of Aggie Hamada with her dimpled, radiant face. She thought of Jensen Willard, who was somehow both dignified and vulnerable in her wrinkled dress and mud-caked boots. The whole group together, all twelve of them, had been the wild cards, the girls she couldn’t have prepared for.

  The midmorning and afternoon sections of Autobiographical Writing: Personal Connections had been more along the lines of what she’d expected: girls who seemed friendly with one another, who talked to one another when Vera was talking; girls who tried to slip out their cell phones to send a text when they thought Vera wasn’t looking and even when they knew she was; girls who looked at her shrewdly when they wanted to give off the impression of being good, of paying attention. They had none of the morning class’s quiet sense of expectancy. There was something to be said for students who came in with no expectations.

  Though the students in her second and third classes were a less interesting mix than her first, Vera had become progressively more comfortable in how she presented herself—honing and retooling the aspects of the discussion that hadn’t gone so well the first time around, keeping her topics on track, and even managing a few jokes that had made the girls in the later sections smile. Indulgent smiles, a small sop to Vera, but smiles nonetheless. The morning class, she thought, was never going to see her at her best; they were always going to be her trial run for the day. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, guinea pigs that they were.

  At home Vera sat at her worktable and scrawled a few illegible notes about the first four chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. She typed up a list of discussion questions, a handout for the students; since the handout was a last-minute idea, she would have to go to school even earlier the next morning to make the photocopies. Really, Vera scolded herself, you need to plan better in advance. Again, the feeling of fraudulence nagged at her. A real teacher would be better prepared. Disconsolate at this thought, she tried to cheer herself with a bit of mindless TV, flipping between a reality show about brides and a reality show about people who were hiding in bunkers because they believed a deadly apocalypse was coming.

  She picked up the remote again and paused at a local news station when the mug shot of a familiar face appeared in the upper corner of the screen. “As the date for the trial of the Angela Galvez murder draws closer, twenty-five-year-old Ritchie Ouelette of Biddeford, Maine, has changed his plea from guilty to innocent,” the news anchor said in liquid tones that barely masked her broad Maine vowels, but Vera was concentrating more on Ouelette’s mug shot. The young man had an elongated face, prematurely thinning hair, and an expression so incredulous, so seemingly without guile, that his picture was hard to look at. Vera had known he would come around to pleading innocent. Seeing this mug shot anew, she was even more convinced of her earlier hunch that he was, in fact, as innocent as he now claimed.

  Vera prided herself in knowing a great deal about the criminal mind and considered herself intuitive when it came to determining a suspect’s guilt. Local serial killer Ivan Schlosser was a prime example—there had never been any doubt in her mind of his culpability. But Ouelette was young and nervous, the sort who could easily be coerced into his initial false confession, especially in light of the mounting circumstantial evidence against him—the carpet fiber from the trunk of his Ford found on the girl’s body, the unspecified DNA (blood, Vera imagined) that had been found on the vehicle’s front seat. There were some who also falsely confessed because they thought it would give them their fifteen minutes of fame, but Ritchie Ouelette didn’t strike her as that type. In all the news footage Vera had seen of him, he hunched his tall frame as though he wished to disappear into himself.

  She thought again of her early morning class and what they had had to say about Angela Galvez. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Dorset, ordinarily so complacent, was still shaken by the crime that had occurred a few months before. The Dorset murder had, in fact, had some influence on her decision to relocate to that town. Still in Bond Brook when the story broke, she had started collecting news clippings about the Galvez murder, comparing her findings to other true-crime cases that bore some similarity to the case. She had even come up with a little psychological profiling of the culprit: He was a solitary figure, she’d decided. Probably someone who still lived with his parents. Past convictions might include minor charges for being a Peeping Tom or some other minor voyeuristic offense. He was someone who liked to watch people, and that desire to watch had escalated into a desire to touch, to control, to possess.

  As it had turned out, Ouelette did not fit this profile. He was a young number cruncher with an associate’s degree in accounting, and he was raising his teenage brother by himself; he had once been charged with a DUI, but the criminal history ended there. Vera was sure that the person who
fit her profile would damn well try to make use of his victim sexually before disposing of her body, yet there had been no discernible attempt to violate Angela Galvez, whose body had been found in a Dumpster behind a neighborhood Laundromat.

  The news broadcast ended, and Vera sat in a stupor, watching the next two shows that followed. By the time evening had settled—another unseasonably warm evening, with the temperature holding fast—Vera became restless. To go out or not to go out? She decided it would do no harm to walk to one of her favorite bars for a solo congratulatory drink or two, a pick-me-up for having survived her first day at the Wallace School.

  The bar she chose, a place called Pearl’s, was comfortable and dimly lit, with dark wooden fixtures and nooks where one could make oneself inconspicuous if one wanted to. Tonight she sat up at the bar, on a seat as distant from everyone as she could find; it was true that some men might notice her and try to strike up a conversation, but she trusted her ability to steer them away politely. Though she liked the validation of being thought attractive enough to single out in a bar—and found it hilarious that those who did ranged in age from twenty-two to sixty-two—it was the three-dollar well drink specials, and not the men, who drew her there.

  An hour passed, then two. Vera enjoyed the music that was playing from the jukebox and even, in her own masochistic way, began to enjoy the banal conversations she could overhear from nearby tables. “I might have gone out with him a second time,” she heard one girl with a piping voice say to another, “but my ferret hated him. She hates all men. I think one time a man did something bad to her. You know, like a gerbil-type deal.” Her intention of leaving after two drinks somehow got cast aside, and as she was on her third drink, a man asked if he could take the bar stool next to her. “I guess so,” she said.