—What did you say your name was? I asked Shannon.
I stuck out my right hand, waiting.
—It’s Shannon Larsen. It is such a pleasure to meet you.
We ate.
—How do you like the cake? the mistress asked.
And the two of us said in strange, tinkling unison,
—It’s delicious.
We swallowed.
3
Spectral Evidence
-JENNIFER-
April 2005
Mr. Dakota stood in front of me, pacing in bare feet, twisting his copy of The Crucible into a tight scroll, watching his actors fumble onstage, especially Tarryn, who leaned against the table on stage left, a dash of tan skin showing between her jeans and her tank top, slipping one foot out of her too-white slip-on and back in again, while Dillon screwed up his lines as John Proctor. Tarryn shifted legs and stretched her hands behind her back. I could hear her joints crack from the front row. Her face was hexagonal and her nose was long, almost too long, and some girls said she’d started getting eyelash extensions when she turned seventeen last year. It wasn’t fair. She was already pretty, a senior who was going out of state for college, and on top of that she drove her mom’s Miata to school. I wanted to be her when I grew up, but I was only a year behind and worried that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish enough in such a short time.
—Give me a word, John, a soft word, she said.
—I c-c-come to see what mischief your uncle’s brewing now . . . Line? Dillon stuttered.
If Mr. Dakota didn’t already regret casting Dillon, I thought, he had to by now. Dillon couldn’t inflect or project and thought that real acting meant flinging his arms outward during his monologues. But that was the way it was at our school. Every girl wanted to be a star and only three or four guys would read for parts. Tarryn sighed and slid her bare foot back into her slip-on.
—Put it out of mind, Abby, Mr. Dakota prompted.
—Put it out of mind, Abby, Dillon said flatly. He adjusted his basketball shorts, which were just seconds away from slipping off his ass.
—John, Tarryn whispered, her voice low, her whole body turned toward him, showing an urgency that I had never felt, let alone been able to imitate—John, I am waitin’ for you every night.
—Very good, Mr. Dakota said. Very good. Now hold that for a second.
He climbed onto the stage in his usual way, by swinging one leg and propelling himself up with a flat palm. The soles of his feet had been blackened by the cheap tiles of the auditorium floor. He stood between Tarryn and Dillon like he was the reverend at a teenage wedding.
—Don’t forget, Dillon, that you’re still in love with this girl, he said. Abigail is supposed to be bewitching to you, even if you don’t want her to be. She’s supposed to be—
—sexy! shouted one of Tarryn’s stupid friends from stage right.
—Ow ow! yelled another.
Mr. Dakota smiled but didn’t say anything. He had gotten a haircut over the weekend; he had nice ears.
—Can we take five? Tarryn asked, and the actors hopped offstage before Mr. Dakota agreed with her. He rolled his script tighter and stared at the sound booth at the back of the auditorium until he saw me smiling at him.
—Jennifer, Jennifer. It’s like herding cats, isn’t it?
He never called me Jen. I was not a cat. We understood each other.
That night I fell asleep in a doze that wrapped up Abigail’s lines about knowing John Proctor with the black bottoms of Dakota’s soles.
• • •
As was tradition, we’d spent the fall semester at Mountdown Academy covering every grievance a white man had committed against another group in the 1500s. Slaves were whipped in North America, Incas were strangled, and China wised up and cut itself off from the rest of the world. We were up to our necks in historical shame. At least with the Puritans in Salem we didn’t have to feel so guilty. Now we were just slaughtering our own fellow white people. The academy was known for its collaborative curriculum, so every class for the next two weeks had to be related in some way to the Puritan age in America, no matter how far teachers had to stretch to make it work. In trig, one teacher wrote word problems that required finding the angle of depression in relation from the top of the town stocks. In art, we made our own scarlet letters. I chose N, for nail biter. Pablo Esposito created a quilled letter F with little tendrils of paper curling inside of the borders.
—What does it stand for? I asked.
—Fornicator, he said.
—Fag, offered another kid.
—I didn’t say which kind of fornicator, Pablo said evenly.
We were supposed to wear our letters around the school for the day but instead we stuffed them into the trash, like an alphabet soup of sins.
• • •
In English, Ms. Leones, with the bulging eyes and fat neck that she covered with paisley scarves, announced that she had a migraine and told us to split into pairs and discuss what ethical lessons could be derived from a punitive culture of shame. She disappeared into the supply closet with her afghan and a yoga bolster.
—Did you know the technical definition of an orgy is just a group of five or more people not wearing shoes? Sasha said.
—That’s BS, I said. That’s one of those urban legends, like when people say that you swallow eight spiders in your sleep every year.
—Five, Sasha corrected.
—I’d believe three, I said. I think I’d notice if I ate more than five.
—You just don’t want to believe, she said.
—Why would I?
Tarryn was sound asleep at her table, her face cradled in her forearms, her body slumped in complete repose.
Sasha and I stared at her.
—I don’t understand how her gut doesn’t stick out over her jeans when she’s bent over like that, I said.
In college, when my sorority sisters would pass out at the dining room table after a long night of drinking, we’d take pictures of them from the side that showcased their soft, bloated bellies and tape them on the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. By my senior year, it didn’t even seem cruel anymore, not even when I photographed a new, dead-eyed sister called Pancake and gave a copy to a guy she had a thing for at our next mixer.
—You know Tarryn’s fucking Dakota, Sasha said.
—You are so full of shit today, I said.
—Hand to God. Some of the stagehands saw them hooking up.
—Hooking up, as in fucking backstage?
—Implausible, Roy Coltrane said from the desk behind us.
Sasha swiveled around in her chair and stared.
—You really think so? she asked, overly sweet.
—It doesn’t seem likely, Roy said.
—It doesn’t seem likely, Sasha repeated. Fuck off, Roy.
—I wouldn’t blame him if they were fucking, Dillon said. He grinned at Roy, who had a face so pockmarked I wanted to sand it, and didn’t smile back.
—Mr. Dakota’s not stupid, Roy said. He wouldn’t throw away a job for a slutty teenager.
—What if he doesn’t like his job? I asked.
The supply closet door cracked open and Ms. Leones stuck out her bleary face.
—All, I can feel the energy in this room and it is not conducive to wellness and growth, she said. She went back into the closet until the period ended and Lillian Harper gently rapped on the door to make sure she was awake for her next class.
• • •
In cultural history, Mr. Blevins told us about witch cakes, and poppets, and shoes.
—The Puritans, he said (long pause), were a very (long pause) superstitious people . . .
Jarred Liotta sketched Blevins with a top hat and monocle, looking like the Monopoly man, in the margins of his notebook.
—Their belief in evil spirits led them to perform . . . unusual rituals . . .
It didn’t matter that Blevins was drier than jerky. Talking about spirits had all of us intrigu
ed. Jarred Liotta stopped drawing an erection on Mr. Blevins. He pressed his forearms over the drawing and stared. We waited for Blevins to finish his dramatic pause, but it took too long and finally one of us had to prompt him.
—How did they keep the spirits away? asked Lillian Harper.
—Often, they would combat the evil spirits with the good, Blevins said. In many homes throughout New England (long pause) a single, well-worn shoe can be found buried within the walls (long pause) or under a hearthstone. Any guesses as to why that may be?
—The other shoe decayed? offered Chip Finnick.
—No. He sighed. Any other speculations?
—They got rid of the other one so the good spirit couldn’t run away? I said.
—Well done, Jennifer!
No need to tell him that I’d visited Salem on a class field trip before I switched to Mountdown two years ago, where, on the second floor of the Witch House Museum, next to the out-of-place room about medical cannibalism, there had been a rotting shoe in a glass case with a sign saying the same thing, and no need to tell him that, when I saw the shoe, I’d been enchanted by the idea that someone would want to keep a spirit in their house instead of pushing it out, good or not, and the idea that these people with their stodgy little black and white outfits and their fear of dancing were willing to believe in the old-fashioned magick with a k. No need. I let him think I was a good guesser.
—Does it work? asked Jarred.
—Does what work, son?
—The shoe? Does the shoe work?
—I mean, it’s a hard matter to (long pause) empirically measure, Mr. Blevins said.
—Does the person have to be dead for it to work?
—I haven’t tried it, Blevins said drily.
• • •
What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made. They all seemed related. My sorority sisters Corinne and Margot and Shannon had the same shimmer: Corrine, who looked like Grace Kelly, and Shannon, with her sharp chin and small mouth, and Margot, with her impossibly shiny black hair. And even later, I would see it in my boss, with her vicious inflection and the way she could hover for long hours on high heels with calf muscles pumping like hearts as she walked, absent of pain. It was as if they’d inherited an uncanny grace, a physical flawlessness that was not in my DNA. Tarryn was my first exposure to the unattainable, but I didn’t call it that then. I only called it jealousy. Onstage, I plodded out my lines as a servant named Mary and found myself hurling my performance into the audience for Mr. Dakota and for Tarryn, for different reasons.
I fake sobbed into Sasha’s arms in my first big scene.
—Goody Osborne will hang! I wailed.
—Very good, Mr. Dakota said from the front row. But hold it there for a minute.
Sasha and I clutched at each other and tried not to laugh.
Dakota climbed on the stage before us and sat cross-legged at our feet. His eyes were glistening under the stage lights. If I looked up, I’d see the filters of reds and greens, never understanding how they could cross and transform into something colorless and clean. Tarryn was sitting up in the front row.
—Now, Jennifer, when you cry, I want it to be a real surge of emotion, he said. I want you to channel your terror here. Mary Warren is a girl who has spent her childhood completely powerless and now suddenly she has an influence on other people’s lives. She is wracked with guilt and fear. I want you to mine your own life and try to push your guilt and fear into her character.
—I have no guilt, I said.
—Everyone has guilt.
He had wide eyes, and though I’d never thought brown eyes were especially nice, I liked his.
—Not me, I said.
Sasha, still embracing me, squeezed me, the in-cahoots squeeze of what-the-hell-are-you-doing.
—Whatever you have that is conflicting, channel that, he said.
He climbed offstage.
—Goody Osborne will hang! I said, and then found myself crumpling into a feeling that I couldn’t explain.
—Gorgeous, Dakota said. Really gorgeous work today.
• • •
Mountdown Academy had put up magenta flyers in the bathroom about depression awareness. The flyer had a droopy stick figure and some bulleted symptoms to watch out for:
Do you feel . . .
• Helpless?
• Irritable?
• Tired?
• Unable to Focus?
Someone wrote in Sharpie over the poster: if this is depression then im dead.
In pen, someone else wrote: RIP
• • •
Jarred Liotta brought a green Croc to cultural history.
—It was my meemaw’s, he explained. She died last year but she was the nicest lady.
Someone in the back row snorted.
—What’s that? Jarred Liotta said. If any of you have something to say about my meemaw come up here so I can fuck your shit up like a man.
—Now, now, Blevins said lazily. The English language is far too compelling to waste on curse words.
—How do we know your meemaw was a good spirit? asked Sasha. How do we know she wasn’t a total creep to everyone but you?
—She wasn’t, Jarred said. She was in the Red Hat Society.
—That doesn’t make me wanna keep her around, Sasha said.
—Shut it, Sasha, Pablo Esposito said. She meant something to him. It’s not a joke.
—We can vote on whether or not to keep Mrs. Liotta’s shoe in the classroom, Mr. Blevins said.
—What about absentee votes? Roy asked.
—Quorum is present, Blevins said.
There were twelve ayes and three nays.
We didn’t have a hearthstone and we couldn’t dig a hole, so we put Mrs. Liotta’s Croc on top of the TV with a sign for the janitors: do not remove—experiment in progress.
We spent the rest of class talking about the nature of spectral evidence in Salem. How you could leave your body and project a curse onto an enemy without making any physical movements.
—Is that a real thing? Sasha asked.
—The Puritans certainly believed it was, Blevins said.
I cast myself out of the desk chair and wandered down the hallways, passing my locker, rounding the corner, seeking out Tarryn and finding her in the bathroom, adjusting a bra strap while she examined her side profile in the mirror, and tried, with all of my bodiless being, to slam her face into the glass.
—Don’t fall asleep, Sasha whispered. You’ll do that thing where your head bobs back and forth.
• • •
At rehearsal, we reached the scene where Abigail was in court, and I was a follower trying to claw my way back onto her Puritanical good side. I didn’t know it, but I was rehearsing for many years of trying to be seen by the women I hated and adored.
—He wake me every night, his eyes were like coals and his fingers claw my neck, and I sign, I sign! I shouted.
In character, I could stare at Tarryn. She was bewitching me. She watched me with a fury that I believed. I blurted and wept my lines and then, as if magnetized, I ran to her and let her hold me in her arms while I sobbed onstage, her fingers stroking and catching a snag in my hair, her neck warm against my cheek. Up close she was poreless. She smelled like my mom’s verbena candle at home.
From the audience, Mr. Dakota applauded.
—Tarryn, make sure to keep your expression exactly like that on opening night, he said. You’ve nailed it.
She smiled at him as he turned away to give the stagehands his notes.
—Nice work, Tarryn, I muttered.
She ste
pped backward.
—Something wrong? she asked.
—No. I said nice work.
—Is there a problem?
—No, I said.
She crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her hair behind her ear.
—I’m not into games, she said. You got something to say to me, you can say it. You don’t need to talk shit about me with your friend in English when you think I’m asleep. Close your mouth. Don’t look so stunned.
It was infuriatingly unfair that she could see what a bad person I was.
When the stagehands had switched off the lights and everyone had dragged their backpacks out of their chairs and gone home to their parents and their mundane lives, I stayed. I was compelled. I had to stay. Dakota piled the last scripts into his bag and saw me sitting out in the audience. I sat Indian style and let my head drop down. I was trying to look burdened but not needy.
—You okay?
—I’m just going through some stuff, I said.
—Do you need to talk?
I nodded, faking reluctance.
His office was cramped and didn’t have windows, but he’d fixed it by taping posters of shows from years past on the walls. Our Town, and Grease, and Much Ado About Nothing. He flopped into his swivel chair and propped his bare, blackened feet on his desk. He rolled his shirt up at the forearms.
—How does someone know if they’re depressed? I asked him.
—Why do you think you’re depressed?
—I’m tired and I can’t think straight and I feel sort of helpless. And there’s a flyer in the girls bathroom that says those are the symptoms.
—Oh, he said, oddly relieved. That’s not depression.
—It isn’t?
—No, that’s just being seventeen.
I was sixteen, young for a junior. I didn’t correct him.
—It’s not forever, he said. One day you’ll go to a good college, and find a nice job, and a great partner, and you’ll be happy.
—That’s it? I said.
—That’s it.
—So all I have of my life is some more school and some paychecks and a marriage and death?
—If you’re lucky, he said. And if you’re really lucky, you won’t be too smart, so you won’t notice that it’s happening.
Sorority Page 4