• • •
Later that evening, the three murdered girls—Heidi, Angela, and Sufia—looked benevolently at Vera from their spots on the wall as she sat in front of her laptop and stared at the in-box of her Wallace School email account.
There in her queue of unread messages was the old one from Jensen Willard—the message from days before, which she had ignored last Saturday night. She could no longer remember why she had avoided it. In the grand scheme of things—in days darkened by death and shame and worry—a message from Jensen Willard seemed like nothing to be afraid of.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: journals
Hello,
I am writing this on Friday afternoon from the school computer. I’m feeling bad now about the journal I turned in—if you’ve read it already, you know it isn’t very good. I know it’s stupid to go on and on about a boyfriend—so typical teenager-y—but I have one more entry I want to send to you. I’m sorry to have to make you read all this; I’ll have something better to turn in next time, I hope. Things are a little difficult in my head right now, but writing usually helps.
Sincerely,
Jensen Willard
Vera remembered precious little about Jensen’s last journal entry, much less understood why it warranted an apology. Hadn’t she written about Bret again? What else would a young girl write about, if not her boyfriend? It seemed a long time ago—ages ago—since Vera had given it any thought.
The attachment at the bottom of Jensen’s email read only “Gore.” Vera bit her lip, looked at it, and squinted closer at the screen as it filled with Jensen’s boldface heading:
You Never Saw Such Gore in Your Life: Journal Entry #4, by Jensen Willard
I ought to warn you that I’m a little angry right now. And when I get angry, I don’t see red, like you’re always hearing about in books. I see white. Everything turns to snow in front of my eyes. Eventually this page will fill up with black ink but even then I will still see nothing but a white page.
I mentioned to you in the last journal that Bret hadn’t called me in a while. Well, he did call me, a little earlier than our usual scheduled talk, and things are as bad as I suspected.
Worse.
What makes it worse is that he started off being all normal about everything. He started talking about how he was teaching himself to read Gaelic. He talked about a reading he’d been assigned in his ethics class. He went on and on about this for so long that after a while, I just couldn’t stand it anymore, so I broke in and said the dumbest thing imaginable to him.
I said, “I miss you.”
There was this long silence and this crackle at the other end of the line (the connection wasn’t very good—it never is). I heard a background noise like someone talking, or maybe a voice from the TV—I couldn’t tell. “Your parents are ultimately paying for this call,” I said after a while. “Don’t you want to talk to me?”
“Jensen, listen. There’s something I should probably tell you about. Do you remember Tova, the girl in my calculus class I mentioned?”
I vaguely remembered him saying something about having a study partner and how she had burned him a “really cool CD” of techno music. The whiteness was already starting to creep in, and with it a coldness.
“Don’t tell me anymore,” I said. “Don’t say another word.”
But he kept on going, the bastard.
“We fooled around a little. I didn’t exactly intend for that to happen.”
“What does ‘a little’ mean?”
“Um . . . almost to the point of penetration?”
I should have hung up the phone. Bret’s voice sounded so stupid. Who says “almost to the point of penetration”? He made it sound like a laboratory experiment or something.
“There’s something else I should tell you, too,” he said. “You know my roommate? Max?”
I couldn’t even speak. I just waited for him to go on.
“Max and I have experimented a little,” he said. “I don’t think it really means anything. But I just thought, since I was telling you about Tova, I should tell you about Max, too.”
“I hate you,” I said at last.
“What?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t hate you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” (What was I apologizing for? Why do I apologize when it’s other people who should do the apologizing?)
“I’m the one who’s sorry.” Bret sounded almost contrite, with an emphasis on “almost.” He needs to work on his sincerity. “It’s meaningless, really. I mean, I find Tova very attractive, but she isn’t as well read as she could be. All she reads besides assigned readings are those Douglas Adams hitchhiker books. I find Max attractive, too. But I don’t really see that going anywhere.”
The sentences “I find her very attractive . . . I find him attractive, too” oozed through my head. I wanted to kill Bret. I wanted to go down to Columbia and find him and Tova and Max and smother the three of them with one pillow. I simmered and boiled as the air grew colder around me. I felt like one of those people with hypothermia who experience a great heat just before they go mad and freeze to death.
I still do.
“Jensen? Are you there?”
I didn’t feel as though I was. I felt as though I were already gone. But, for the sake of formality, I said, “I think I have to go now.”
“I know we haven’t had sex or anything,” Bret said. “You and I, I mean. But intellectually, I feel much closer to you than anyone. I don’t want to lose you. I’ve never told you this, but I’m in love with your mind.”
I replaced my parents’ old phone on its cradle.
I kept replaying what he had said about being in love with my mind. It seemed like just about the meanest thing a guy could say to a girl.
Would it kill him to just say he found me attractive and just leave it at that? Even if it weren’t true?
The unspoken part of being told you have a beautiful mind is that it means the rest of you leaves a lot to be desired. I know it’s considered shallow to worry about being pretty, but I don’t have much to worry about in that department—even my own mother refuses to give me that affirmation. Once, when I was about twelve, I asked her, “Mom, do you think I’m pretty?” and her response was that looks aren’t important. Translation: Either I’m too ugly for words or her staunch New England upbringing makes her incapable of handing out compliments for fear that I might get ideas about myself and start trying to shit above my ass. I kid you not.
The thing is—the really sad thing is—that Bret has been getting better-looking to me all the time, in my mind. I wish you could see a picture so you could judge for yourself; I’m not sure what you find attractive or unattractive. After first meeting him, my mom took me aside and exclaimed, “What do you even see in him? He looks like a baby egret—like he’s not done yet.” (So much for looks not being important.)
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 any
more.
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 someti
mes 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.
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