What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  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.

  “I’ll always remember Sufia’s lunches,” Jamie said. “They always smelled good, and if you asked her what she was eating, she was always willing to share some of it. It was because of her that I first tried sambuusas.”

  Vera thought of sambuca, the liqueur. But then Cecily-Anne said, “Ohhhh, are those like samosas?”

  “Yes, but better. The spices are different.”

  Aggie Hamada raised her hand. “I think it would be nice if we all shared a memory of Sufia. I have one I’d like to share.”

  The twitch had begun to settle into Vera’s lips and into the muscles of her cheeks. She listened as Jamie told a story of how Sufia had been a valuable member of the debate team. “Mrs. Fortunato—the debate coach—used to call her our secret weapon,” she said, “because she stuck by her beliefs and always let her argument unfold in a . . . patient way.”

  The other girls began to add to the stories. Soon, almost everyone had something they remembered: the extra pens Sufia always carried, in many colored inks, which she willingly lent to girls who’d lost or forgotten their own; Sufia’s laugh, which was rare but delightful, making her whole body shake from head to toe.

  “These are such lovely memories,” Vera said when the stories began to dwindle. She was sure at this point that her students could see her tremors, and she thought that a couple of them were even looking at her with a mixture of revulsion and concern. Jensen Willard in particular was looking at her with what Vera thought might be sympathy, in her pale, gray, watchful way. Vera realized that Jensen was the only girl who had not shared a story about Sufia. “Anyone else?” she said, fixing her gaze on the girl. “Anyone else who has a memory to speak of?”

  Just as she could have predicted, Jensen Willard pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  Vera looked at the clock. There were still forty-five minutes left of class time. She had planned to allocate some of the day’s class time to a discussion of The Catcher in the Rye, but Vera knew that talking about Holden Caulfield’s slow disintegration and denial of the same were not the right topics to take on just now. “Let’s do something a little different today,” she said, her lips still twitching. “Poetry. I don’t think you’ll mind taking a little break from Catcher for a day or two, will you? Take out your literature anthologies and turn to page 646. Richard Wilbur, ‘The Beautiful Changes.’”

  Not budging from her perch on the table, Vera let students monopolize the discussion of the poem, interjecting very little herself; she even let Martha True read it aloud, in her girlish, quavery voice. In the remaining class time, she asked students to start drafting poems of their own. “You can write about loss if you’d like,” Vera said, “or about sorrow. Or, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to write about those things.”

  As was often the case, she was rather amazed when they obeyed her. She still had not gotten used to the fact that she could say something like “Everyone start writing a poem,” and everyone would actually do so. But her girls were essentially still children, and children were obedient creatures. As the girls frowned and scribbled and frowned some more, Vera thought they even looked childlike; the tip of Kelsey Smith’s tongue protruded from her lips, making her look like an earnest toddler crafting a painting, while Jensen Willard’s tousled cap of hair fell in her face as she started working out her first lines. Vera took this opportunity to sit quietly and feel the panic ebb out of her. When the last of the tremors had ebbed away, she felt weakened all over, as though she’d been run over by a truck.

  Once the exercise was finished, Harmony Phelps said, “Are we going to get our journals back today?”

  “Oh,” Vera said, jumping up off the table, “I do have them. Thank you for reminding me.”

  She reserved a minute at the end of class to hand back students’ journals, fully expecting that the girls would head for the door as soon as they received them. Instead, each girl sat with her journal just as Jensen had a few days prior, taking time to read Vera’s handwritten feedback. For a moment she felt simultaneously flustered, pleased, and self-conscious, adding to the mental confusion she already felt; then she realized they were probably just subdued, rather than entranced by her comments.

  The girls finally started to leave. Aggie Hamada said “Have a nice day” as she passed. Katherine “Kitty” Arsenault, one of Vera’s most reticent students, called out “See you tomorrow!” on her way out. It proved to Vera what she had seen play out time and again in other classes she’d taught: You could stand before a class all day long and exchange ideas till you were blue in the face, but there was no greater bond to be formed than when grief and vulnerability were shared. That’s where she liked to think their sudden kindness came from, anyway; she didn’t like to think that they just felt
sorry for her.

  Her strength regained, Vera stood up and called out, “Jensen? Could I speak to you for a second?” just as the girl was lifting herself arthritically out of her seat.

  Jensen did as she was asked, and Vera could see that the whites around her amber eyes had a yellowish look that she’d never noticed before. It occurred to her that the girl might not be getting enough sleep. And no wonder, given all that was going on lately. “Are you doing okay?” she asked.

  “I’m doing all right. Why?”

  “I know from your journal entry that you’re going through a little bit of a rough time, that’s all. And then, well . . . there’s Sufia.”

  The girl shrugged. “Are you okay?” she asked Vera.

  Vera took this as a jab at her visible nervousness in the classroom. Even if the question was well-meaning, coming from a place of genuine concern, she had no intention of answering it. “I’m fine. Listen, while I’ve got you up here, there’s something else I want to ask of you. Could you please make an effort to be on time from now on? Class begins promptly at eight o’clock. Everyone else is on time, so it’s only fair that you are, too. I know maybe this is a funny time to bring that up, but I’ve been meaning to mention it for a while.”

  “Okay. I can make an effort.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “I’m sorry I’m a little late sometimes. I have to motivate a little bit before I get from class to class. But did you know this is my favorite class?”

  “Is it? Thank you.” Vera hadn’t been expecting that. She felt herself blushing at the compliment and feeling ludicrous for doing so.

  “You’re welcome. It’s nice of you to put up with me and read all my writing.”

  “I worry a bit, that’s all. It’s not a question of putting up with you.”

  Then Jensen said something that nearly floored Vera. “It must have been awful for whoever found Sufia in the park like that.”

  “Yes,” Vera said. “I’m sure it was.”

  “I wonder what she looked like. I mean, being dead and all.”

  Her chest tightening again, Vera said, “I don’t feel quite comfortable with this line of discussion.”

  “You know what else? I heard that her boyfriend did it.”

  “Where did you hear that from? Chelsea Cutler, maybe?”

  “Just around.” Jensen’s lips moved in something as close to a smile as Vera had ever seen from her. “I have to go to French now,” the girl said. “Bye.” She turned on her heels, dragging her knapsack behind her in a clatter of buckles.

  Uneasily, Vera watched her go, until the clattering grew fainter and fainter down the corridor outside her classroom door.

  • • •

  The rest of Vera’s classes were better. Though she now felt foolish for moving into a poetry unit, she repeated the morning’s discussion with her last two sections, not wanting one group to get ahead of the other in their Catcher readings. When classes were over, Sue MacMasters stopped her outside the door of the faculty lounge with another invitation to meet up with the English teachers for tomorrow’s lunch. The underlying purpose of this, Vera knew, was for the group to commiserate about Sufia Ahmed. Vera was tempted to say she was so bogged down in paperwork she couldn’t possibly join them, but she knew the solemnity of recent events required her presence. Besides, these faculty lunches, though still strained, were getting a little easier for her. She had now met informally with the English faculty three times, and each lunch period had been a little less painful than the one before. They weren’t a bad group of women on the whole, Vera had to remind herself during those seemingly protracted forty-five-minute lunches. They were well-meaning, and they seemed as though they accepted her, or were at least getting used to her quiet, standoffish ways.

  Once Sue was gone, Vera went inside the lounge to check her mailbox. She sorted through a few memos, threw out a postcard one shamelessly self-promoting faculty member had distributed to advertise her pottery exhibit, and retrieved one short, typed document that looked like a student essay, though it had no name or title at the top. She looked at it, flinched, and looked at it again, first checking around the room to make sure no one else was with her.

  I’m still thinking about Sufia. I can’t help it. And I can’t help wondering about you. It seems this is really getting to you.

  One has to wonder about someone who just goes waltzing through the park at two or three in the morning and why she would be there to begin with. What did this person think when she first saw Sufia? I’ve read accounts from other people who’ve stumbled across dead bodies and how they thought they were seeing a department store mannequin or a doll. Is that what this person thought?

  I’ve been reading all the articles about Sufia I can find—mostly the same one, reprinted over and over in different papers. It feels like Angela Galvez all over again, doesn’t it?

  If I’m being completely honest, I’m jealous of both of them—both these dead girls. Not because of the attention, but because they got away. I wish it was that easy for me to escape. Sometimes I like to think of death as an adventure, a retreat. It would be the nicest vacation I’d ever have, and the best part would be that it wouldn’t have to end.

  Think of it: No more worrying about being disappointed. No more worrying about disappointing other people. No more trying to impress people who I can’t even impress. And I suppose this is the very definition of egotistical, but I can’t help wondering what people would say about me once I was gone—would anyone miss me? Would Bret? Or would I just continue to be that whispered-about weird girl doing another weird thing, the weird thing to end all weird things?

  How nice it would be to just die for a little while and come back when the coast is clear. But I don’t think it happens that way. Even if I believed in life after death, which I’m not sure I do, there would be no guarantee that we could come back when we felt ready; we would have to come back at somebody else’s whim. I wonder if Angela and Sufia are going to come back. Maybe they already have. Maybe they’re already here—right here beside you, in the room you’re standing in now, just waiting for you to notice them.

  Vera, having read the last line, whirled around as though expecting someone to have crept up behind her. There was no one there. Her hands had begun to tremble again, causing the typed pages to rattle, and she sought out the cubicle in which the school secretary, Eileen, worked.

  “Eileen?” she said. “Did a student drop off a paper for you to put in my box? A short, dark-haired girl?”

  “No,” said Eileen, a salty young woman who seemed years older than her actual age—a woman who always looked at Vera with a hint of mockery, as though thinking she could take her in a bar fight. Which she probably could.

  “I have a paper in my box from a student,” Vera said. “I’m just wondering how it got in there since students don’t have access to the lounge.”

  “Beats me,” Eileen said.

  School had ended only fifteen minutes before. Many students were still in the halls. Vera took off from the lounge and sped through the corridors, garnering looks from the students she passed; panting, she ran up and down the rows of lockers on all three flights of the school, searching for Jensen Willard. She was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter Seven

  On Friday, Jensen Willard was absent from Vera’s class. She was absent again on the following Monday, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, she was still a no-show. This was cause for concern. Per the Wallace School’s policy, any student who missed four consecutive school days was the recipient of a check-in from the attendance office—a phone call asking when she planned to return. Vera had been contemplating an informal check-in of her own, but she could not bring herself to email the girl. Her drafts folder was already full of unfinished queries she could not and would not send—drafts that ranged from accusatory (“Why did you put that journal in my mailbox? What do
you know about me?”) to appropriately concerned (“Your comments worry me. Do you need someone to talk to?”).

  She knew it was fear that prohibited her from sending them. Not fear of Jensen Willard specifically—she didn’t like to think she was becoming afraid of the girl—but fear of the girl’s mental state, which she saw as something quite separate.

  Her quandary was solved when Sue MacMasters came by on Wednesday afternoon and said, “I need you to send me the last few days’ homework assignments for one of your students.” She paused to look at the name written down on her clipboard. “Jensen Willard. Her mother called the school office and requested that all her teachers send the work.”

  “Is Jensen all right?”

  “Sick,” Sue said briskly. “Though her mother did say she’s on the mend. Specifically, she’s started sitting up again and drinking tea.”

  “Sounds like a bad flu, maybe?” Vera kept her tone mild. She did not want Sue to see that the mere mention of Jensen Willard rattled her. Vera took out her notebook and started writing down the past few days’ readings and written assignments. “I’ll make a list of the missing assignments and see that Jensen gets them. If you do happen to speak to her mother again, send my wishes for a speedy recovery.”

  “Oh, I don’t take phone calls like that. Are you kidding? That’s Eileen’s job.”

  Vera’s classes, minus Jensen, resumed their discussions of The Catcher in the Rye, which was finally winding down to its last chapters. The girls seemed confused by Holden’s low spirits and compromised physical health, unsure of what to make of the novel’s penultimate chapter when Holden is nearly in tears while watching his little sister, Phoebe, go round and round on the Central Park carousel.

  “I don’t see why he’d get all worked up about that,” Kelsey Smith said. “Little kids ride on carousels all the time.”