The Girl She Used to Be

by David Cristofano

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by David Cristofano

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: March 2009

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54427-6

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  For Jana

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first to my wife, Jana, who has unconditionally supported me throughout this journey, and who has endured and sacrificed in ways that I will never fully comprehend. No accomplishment on my part—including this book—would have occurred without her. She is my first reader and my first love.

  Thanks to my editors at Grand Central, Michele Bidelspach and Melanie Murray, who caught the missteps and molded the story into the final polished product you’re holding. It would not be nearly the same novel without their guidance and attention to detail. They are wonderful people to work with. And thanks to Tareth Mitch, Karen Thompson, and all the folks at Grand Central, especially Jamie Raab, for taking an early and active interest in the project.

  I am eternally grateful to my agent, Pamela Harty, for her passion and commitment and professionalism, and for making the entire process fun and fulfilling. She is the kind of agent every writer hopes to have. Thanks, too, to Deidre Knight and all the pros at the Knight Agency for keeping the publishing machinery in motion.

  Thanks also to Amelia Madison for getting the boulder to the edge of the cliff, and to Lauren Baratz-Logsted for being the impetus.

  And to my parents, Francis and Helen Cristofano, for fostering a love of reading at an early age, and for providing a house always well stocked with books.

  And thanks to God, for every page, every sentence, every word.

  All farewells should be sudden, when forever.

  —Lord Byron, from Sardanapalus

  NAME ME. GAZE INTO MY EYES, STUDY MY SMILE AND MY DIMPLES and tell me who you see. I look like an Emma. I look like an Amy. I look like a Katherine. I look like a Kathryn. I look like your best friend’s sister, your sister’s best friend. Introduce me. Yell for me. Let me run away and call me back. Run your fingers through my hair and whisper my name.

  Call me whatever you want; it’s just a name, after all.

  When I was born, my parents assembled a string of vowels and consonants so magical, so rhythmic and haunting, that the human form had yet to be married to such beauty.

  When I was six, it was taken away.

  And because of my ineptitude and innocent inability to keep a secret, they took it away again when I was eight.

  And at nine. At eleven. Twice at thirteen.

  Not to worry: the Federal Government was quick to replace the old with the new, to clean up the mess and move us along to the next bland, underpopulated town, to another dot on the map that serves as nothing more than a break from the interstate, a pit stop on the way to some greater place; you know them, but forget them. There has to be a Middletown in almost every state, and I’ve already lived in or near three of them.

  But as temporary as it was, each instance was home, the place where Mom and Dad would be waiting at the end of the day, where the bills got paid, the lawn got mowed, and the mail was delivered. And it had to be. This was the consistent, perverted promise of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

  Today is Tuesday, which means I’m sitting at the head of a classroom facing a semi-arc of high school juniors, all with their heads bowed, taking a geometry pop quiz. They are not the brightest bunch, having to take geometry as juniors and all, but they are sweet and genuine and seem to have more character than the Advanced Placement Calculus juniors I teach in the following period—especially since most kids do not elect to take math as a junior. I spend as much time teaching them proofs as I do the works of Euclid or Gauss or Pythagoras because it is the proofs that will serve them well in life; they’re learning logic. Though I may be less effective than I hope; sadly, today is Tuesday and they are taking that pop quiz—the same day of the week, every week, that I give a pop quiz—and there are always a few who are surprised.

  Life will be cruel to them.

  But above all, I try to teach one central lesson in every class—and if they get this I will make sure they pass: Each and every equation brings an absolute certain conclusion. Well, that and don’t divide by zero. You see, certainty brings security. Security brings trust. Trust brings love.

  Pascal was quite the romantic, eh? And who knows what Edmund Landau was really thinking when he popularized Big O Notation, but I like to pretend.

  These kids, America’s future at its most average, are getting something from me that they’re not getting from the loud, furry-nostriled political science teacher whose classroom backs to mine—that is, an understanding of life.

  Under my wing, you’ll learn that every problem has at least one solution, that logic may follow more than one path as long as it reaches the correct destination, that it’s always best to break an equation down into its simplest parts before solving it. And then and only then will you reach a conclusion and find the warmth of certainty, a certainty you will need when you’re grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night for the third time and whisked off to another town in another state, having left behind friends you will neither see nor communicate with ever again, where you will sit and listen to your parents cry themselves to sleep and keep secrets from you that you will only occasionally be privy to when their prayers turn into a discernible loud whisper, and you will need that certainty when your father looks at you at the breakfast table and tries to ask you to pass the Cheerios but pauses for three seconds—three seconds—to search for your name from the many pedestrian identities that have come and gone from your life, though not so long ago assigned to you by a federal employee.

  So yes, Furry Nostrils can keep his histories of battles and conflicts gone by; we’re fighting the real war right here in Geometry.

  I reach behind my neck and grab my auburn hair and try to twist it into a ponytail, but it’s a teacher’s-salary haircut in the growing-out phase and the best I can do is leave myself looking like a svelte samurai. I put my arms above my head and stretch, and as I glance across the room I see one of my students, a boy named Benjamin, staring at my chest—likely a struggle at any distance, really, but his gaze is steady and undeterred. He, at sixteen, is only ten years my junior, but his interest in my body is just as much perverse as it is illegal. I drop my arms and sink in my chair and notice his gaze remains unchanged and it occurs to me he’s not looking at me, he’s looking through
me. Suddenly he snaps his fingers and smiles, bows his head, and begins fervently writing on his quiz sheet.

  I, you see, did not follow the path of logic and my punishment was arriving at the wrong conclusion. I, indeed, failed.

  I glance at the clock and sigh. “Time’s up,” I say.

  A few kids groan but the majority get up from their seats and deliver the quizzes to my desk, each giving me a saddened smile as though they were aware of my embarrassment. And with each passing student, I covet something, and not the tangible things I might logically want—less mousy hair, a wider smile, green eyes instead of hazel, a 4 on my dresses instead of an 8, less clock and more hourglass—but the things I see in them:

  A stable home, friendships, a heritage, a history, a legacy.

  A future.

  One of the worst parts of being in the Federal Witness Protection Program—or WITSEC, for the sake of verbosity—is that you will never be any of those things you dreamed about as a child, unless your dream was of cold anonymity. You will never be a famous ballet dancer or an all-star shortstop. You will never be an Oscar-winning actor or a world-class journalist. You will never be a congressman, a judge, a CEO, a rock star.

  You will never be.

  Your job as a pawn in the WITSEC game is to be quiet and deal with it. You’ll make a great mail carrier, data-entry specialist, cosmetologist. And yes, you’ll make an excellent teacher. Don’t worry about not having a degree or the proper credentials and certifications—because you’ve got them now. Just be quiet, keep to yourself, and stay under the radar and the government will give you the best thing they have to offer: You get to live.

  The price is an existence of tedium. You have just become irreparably average. You are not special. You are not unique.

  You are not a prime number.

  And as these kids walk past my desk, each with varying amounts of hope and potential, I can’t help thinking that I am experiencing the slowest death known to mankind.

  • • •

  The geometricians shuffle out and the future MIT grads take their places on the warm wooden chairs. I assign them a problem on implicit differentiation that should take about fifteen minutes to solve, an attempt to buy myself some time to grade the geometry pop quizzes.

  Okay, maybe grade is the wrong word.

  Tim, for example, always manages to answer questions correctly when called upon, but actually shakes when a test is put before him, and he sweats right through however many layers of clothing he happens to be wearing that day. His quiz is a mess of scribbled-out mistakes. He gets a B.

  Sharon, this wispy Jewish girl, comes to school three out of five days a week, and only after the bruises have started to heal. Even though she finished merely half of the questions, she gets an A.

  Then we have Derek, a guy dumb enough to not understand the importance of birth control, yet smart enough to unconditionally love his girl while she drops out of school to have their baby—all while his best friends are out enjoying underage drinking and girlfriend swapping. A+, Derek.

  About half of the class gets my subjective grading and the rest take it on their chins like typical juniors.

  Sure, I’m credentialed by the state as a teacher, but I don’t work like one. My interest—okay, obsession—with math is genuine, and has been since the first time I was ripped away from the life I loved. I buried myself in numbers and word problems where an answer was certain (or at least in the back of the book) and I knew I’d found something I could count on. But grading? My curriculum? The PTA? Who cares. The interest for that all sits in the part of my career that I spent no time earning: a bachelor’s degree and the teaching certification that goes along with it.

  One of my prior contacts at WITSEC suggested I not pursue a college degree for real, that I might have to abandon that persona at some point and start fresh, and who’s to say I’d even stay in one place long enough to get a degree anyway. It’s much easier to be handed one, with a snappy grade point average and all the bells and whistles. Just as it is easy to be handed an address, a credit history, a name.

  I’m Sandra Clarke, by the way.

  For now.

  As Tuesday ends, I find my way to the Columbia Mall, located on Columbia Pike in Columbia, Maryland, a mere five minutes from my home. Columbia is one of the earliest master-planned communities, developed by some guy named Rouse, intended to be the suburban mecca that even Eisenhower himself could never have imagined. And of all the places I’ve been relocated to, this one breaks the scale of insipidity. It is a swirl of predictable shopping and cookie-cutter houses and architecturally vapid office buildings and family restaurants that specialize in salad bars and baby back ribs.

  I hate it here.

  But this place, this mall, has one thing in it I love, a thing present in every mall in every Middleton and Middletown and Middleburg and Centreville across this great land: a Hallmark store. At least once a week I visit this special place and slowly walk the aisles, for it is here that I get to witness the true essence of family, of love:

  The man who clumsily pokes through the cards for a half hour until he finds the one that will touch his wife’s heart, the one he knows will lift her spirit because he knows her, the one that brings a sigh of relief.

  The daughter who sifts through the cards until she finds the one for her mother that makes her suppress a giggle, because mothers and daughters understand each other’s idiosyncrasies—and frailties—and can laugh at each other that way.

  The adolescent boy who sneaks into the card store, after telling his father he’d be hanging at GameStop, in order to find a card for his first girlfriend, because telling her how he feels is not only embarrassing, but elusive.

  It is here I get to witness life, albeit the lives of others. I walk through the store and watch people select intimate items for their lovers, their friends, their family, and for the briefest of moments I get to pretend I am there for someone special too. I get to pretend that my parents are still alive and I am looking for the perfect anniversary card. I get to pretend that my mother did not miscarry my little brother from immense stress but instead brought a beautiful boy into this world who picked on me as a child but protected me as a teen, and I would search for an hour for the perfect card to explain my love for him. I get to pretend that my best friend is getting over another breakup from a guy who didn’t deserve her in the first place and—bam—here’s a card that brings it all to light.

  This is my nameless family.

  Tonight I stand close to a guy in his late thirties who looks like George Clooney—actually, like a regular guy who happens to possess all of George Clooney’s flaws: exaggerated chin, droopy eyes, absent upper lip. But there is something about him, something real. He is here for a distinct reason, and because of that he has been selected.

  I follow George around the store, a few steps behind, watching him fumble through the racks. After reading what had to have been a thirtieth card, he hangs his head and wipes the corner of his eye. I step a little closer. He muffles a whimper and I slowly reach out and gently—with the lightest touch I can muster—brush his shoulder, and as my fingers connect with the fabric of his coat, I inhale deeply.

  He swallows and turns my way.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He nods and looks back down, but something in my touch, or the interaction with another caring human, brings his tears to a pour and he wipes vigorously, as though it is sand, not water, filling his eyes. I wait and finally he returns the card to its holder, glances at me, and slowly lumbers from the store as he dries his eyes and nose with his sleeve.

  I watch him leave, then find the card he just put back. It is a card asking for forgiveness, for one more chance.

  I quickly reach into the back of the stack and grab the freshest card and rush to the front of the store and make a purchase—in cash, as usual.

  As I exit the shop, I find George sitting on a bench five stores away, staring blindly into a babyGap. I don’t bother to
sit down—because, really, there is no point in getting to know George for real—and I hand him the bag with the card inside.

  “She’s waiting,” I say, “to give you another chance. She just wants you to ask.” I back up a few paces because I feel the need to ask George to get a drink, where it may turn into three, upon which I will carelessly spill the many beans of my lives and in the morning, with hangover in tow, the feds will have me on my way to another town, another job, another mall with another Hallmark store.

  “Don’t waste one more minute of your life,” I say as I move in reverse. Then I smile and add, “And don’t screw it up this time.”

  I drive home, through the suburban traffic that piles up on Columbia Pike with people who live in Baltimore but work in D.C., or the opposite. And today is Tuesday, which means it’s the night I pay bills, after which I grade the remaining pop quizzes, the ones I always give on Tuesday, where there is at least one correct answer if you follow the path of logic. And I will eat one-third of a pizza from Carmine’s, because it is Tuesday and they know to have it ready for me as they learned so many months ago. And then I will shower and watch one hour of television and then I will repeat my name to myself over and over until I lull myself to sleep. Because today is Tuesday.

  I’M GETTING THAT FEELING AGAIN—A SORT OF WANDERLUST fueled by the assumption that the grass has got to be greener somewhere. Anywhere. I’ve seen a lot of grass, mind you, having moved with the frequency of an army brat and having acquired all of the inevitable angst and rebellion. It is one thing to deal with the lousy decisions in your life and suffer from the relative regret and misery, to play the hand you’ve been dealt; it is quite another to be dealt hand after hand, with some federal employee leering over your shoulder, whispering, “Fold.”

  Anyway, I’m getting that feeling again.

  Randall Farquar, whose name I intentionally mispronounce toward the more phonetic, will not be happy when I call, but it’s his job to talk to me, to protect me, to keep me safe and secure and toasty warm at night.