by Laura McNeal
She heard a small voice say, “Hello?”
Audrey turned, and Clyde’s mother gave her a weak smile. Her eyelids were half closed. Her voice was stretched out, unearthly. “You’re real,” she said. Her eyelids closed, and after a long second opened again. “I thought you were an angel.”
Chapter 80
Resilience
On the first Tuesday afternoon following vacation, Mrs. Leacock was sitting alone at her desk when Audrey walked in to do her makeup essay. Mrs. Leacock had returned to school the day before, looking the same, it seemed to Audrey—the same striped sweater set, the same mahogany lipstick— except thinner. She stood and walked with a wooden erect-ness, and during classes yesterday and today, Audrey hadn’t seen even the beginning of a smile.
When Audrey entered the room, Mrs. Leacock nodded but didn’t smile. She glanced at Audrey’s note cards, handed her a blank blue essay book, and gestured toward the classroom’s empty desks.
“Any of the front ones is fine,” she said, and went back to grading papers.
The writing proceeded smoothly, except for the reminders of Mrs. Leacock’s strangely leaden presence—a drawer opening and closing, some papers shuffled, a pen uncapped. It made Audrey anxious to finish, that and the fact her car was in the shop, which meant she’d have a long walk home when she was done.
Half an hour passed, and Audrey was nearly done with her essay when the classroom door opened and Brian walked in. He didn’t acknowledge Audrey, but he didn’t seem surprised that she was there, either. He walked straight toward Mrs. Leacock, who was regarding him with a doubtful expression.
“Do I know you?” she said.
Brian shook his head. His big hands dangled. “Not really.”
“Then why are you here?”
Brian breathed deeply in and out. “To apologize.”
Mrs. Leacock cocked her head slightly and waited.
“I’m the one who wrote The Yellow Paper.”
If Mrs. Leacock was surprised by this announcement, she didn’t show it. “Yes, and?”
“And I realized what I did wasn’t as funny as I thought.”
Mrs. Leacock regarded him for a second or two. “What brought you to this realization?”
It took Brian a second to get started. “Well,” he said, “I had it worked out in my mind that it wasn’t so bad, that it kind of evened the score or something, but the more I thought about what I’d written about your husband, the worse I felt, and I knew I had to do something, and so . . .”
Mrs. Leacock waited. Her face was white and impassive, and her twirling of the gold ring on her left hand seemed unconscious. When Brian didn’t finish the sentence, Mrs. Leacock looked at him coldly. “And so here you are.”
Brian nodded.
“And you’re willing to suffer the consequences?”
Brian looked down at the floor and nodded again.
“Because otherwise one could argue that this little exercise is more for your good health than mine.”
“Understood,” Brian said. To Audrey, he seemed at this moment suddenly adult.
In the stillness of the room, Mrs. Leacock looked at Brian for a few seconds before saying, “Anything else?”
Brian shook his head no, and Mrs. Leacock said that he could leave. As he turned to go, Brian let his glance meet Audrey’s for just a second, and then she went back to writing. Brian shut the door gently behind him.
For a few minutes there was a heavy silence in the room; then Mrs. Leacock rose. Her shoes clicking on the linoleum floor, she walked to the same window where she’d written the words Shame on you.
“Students never think their teachers are human,” she said, turning around.
Audrey didn’t know how to respond to this.
There was another silence, and then Mrs. Leacock said, “I didn’t, either, when I was in high school. My teachers all seemed old. Not like me in any way.”
Audrey still didn’t know what to say, so she waited.
“Do you know what my husband was? A judge. I’m sure he would have forgiven that boy in an instant. ‘They’re just kids,’ he was always telling me. In his court, he saw everybody as a victim, even the perpetrators. He kept trying to figure out how to punish the right person, but he couldn’t.” Her gaze drifted to the window. Outside, the sky was a dense gray, growing denser. “He used to say that judges needed an off-and-on switch so they could stop thinking about it. But he didn’t have that switch. He thought I did. He told me once that I was the most armored person he’d ever met, and he meant it as a compliment.” She paused. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” Another pause. “Maybe so one person will have the story right when I accept the district’s offer to transfer to another school.”
Audrey didn’t move.
Mrs. Leacock took a deep breath. “My husband talked about his suicide ahead of time. He said it was the point to which his life would inevitably lead him.” Mrs. Leacock’s voice became softer. “He said he didn’t have kids to live for. He made it a joke. He said he didn’t even have a dog to live for.” Pause. “There was a sentence pounding in my head so hard I wanted to scream it. It was You have me to live for. But I never said it. I swallowed it back down and never said it.”
Mrs. Leacock had been looking off toward the windows, but now she let her eyes settle on Audrey. “I might really have been able to save him, but my pride kept me from it. That’s the irony. That boy”—she nodded toward the door that Brian had closed behind him—“got a little information and made a wild accusation, but buried deep inside the hard little heart of it . . .”
She fell silent and returned to her desk. She didn’t seem to want Audrey to say anything. In fact, she seemed to want Audrey to leave, as if that would free Mrs. Leacock, somehow, from the embarrassment of this fleeting intimacy. Audrey finished her essay, and as she brought it up, Mrs. Leacock was sizing and squaring the set of papers she’d just graded. Without smiling, she said, “Mr. Hill wasn’t worth saving. One day you’ll find somebody who is.”
Audrey nodded without saying anything. She didn’t know which was more surprising: that Mrs. Leacock would talk about her husband’s suicide or that she would have something consoling to say about Wickham.
“That boy who was in a while ago,” Mrs. Leacock said, “the one who wrote The Yellow Paper. By now he will have realized that I didn’t ask his name.”
Audrey waited for Mrs. Leacock to say something else, or to ask Brian’s name, but she merely snapped a clip over her set of graded papers. She isn’t going to ask Brian’s name, Audrey thought. She is going to forgive him. Like her husband would’ve done.
As Audrey handed Mrs. Leacock her blue book, she said, “Thanks.”
Mrs. Leacock nodded.
“No, I mean it,” Audrey said. “Thanks for everything. And I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving. You’re a good teacher.”
Mrs. Leacock made a small but actual smile. “Thank you,” she said.
Audrey turned to go, but Mrs. Leacock suddenly had something else to say. “Do you know what resilience means?” she said, and without waiting for an answer went on, in a reciting voice: “The capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused most especially by compressive stress.” She made a small, unhappy smile. “For years I kept that definition pinned on my refrigerator. The point is, we’re all crushed at some time or other. It’s true that some of us never recover our size and shape, but”—this time the smile seemed actually hopeful—“most of us do.”
She dropped her gaze from Audrey, adjusted herself in her seat, removed a clip from a stack of papers, and went back to being Mrs. Leacock, the physics teacher.
Audrey walked out of the room feeling the strange loneliness of Mrs. Leacock. She moved so much within a cloud of her own thoughts that she didn’t notice a lone male figure silently leaning against the far wall of the deserted corridor. She was in fact nearly past him before he said in a low voice, “Hey, Audrey.”
&
nbsp; At first, she was frightened. She thought Theo had come back. But when she turned and saw Clyde, she grinned.
“Still here?” she asked.
“Still here,” he said. “Thought you might want a ride on the Vespa.”
“Isn’t it kind of cold for scootering?”
“Less cold when two go,” he said.
Lesscoldwhentwogo, lesscoldwhentwogo. The words went through Audrey’s head like a chant in a foreign language she thought it might be fun to learn. She put her arm through his and headed for the door, sticking her chin down inside her scarf and waiting to go with Clyde out into the cold.
“Hey, look,” she said when they pushed open the doors.
In Jemison, it was snowing again.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Cornelia Zöller-Wolff of Herdecke, Germany, for her tireless assistance in the creation of Oggy, Joan Slattery for her editorial wisdom, Kathy Lambert and all the Knitties for ongoing inspiration, and Jack Duckworth, Mindy McNeal, and Libby Pierce for facts that informed fiction.
Crushed
A READERS GUIDE
Laura and Tom McNeal
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
When Wickham first arrives in Mrs. Leacock’s classroom, Audrey writes in her notebook, “Something happening. Something definitely happening” (p. 4). Discuss her first impression of Wickham. How does Audrey and Wickham’s initial conversation set the stage for their relationship? Audrey immediately notices that he smells sugary, like Christmas. Do you think this is significant? Why? Contrast Audrey’s initial feelings toward Wickham with her first impression of Clyde. How does her attitude toward the two change by the end of the novel?
C.C.’s mother says, “What makes people interesting is their secrets” (p. 236). Do you think this is true? Discuss which characters have secrets and how these secrets shape their personalities and influence their actions. Toward the end of the novel, Audrey says, “People’s secrets can be what makes them interesting. They can also be what makes them awful” (p. 270). Do you agree? Find some examples in the novel that support this statement. Are there any examples that contradict it? Wickham’s accident is one of the central secrets of the novel. How do you think the accident has affected Wickham? How has keeping it a secret affected him? Is it unfair of Audrey to ask him about the accident? Why do you think he reveals his secret to Lea right away?
There is a cassette tape stuck in Audrey’s car, and the lyrics to the Gilbert & Sullivan song Audrey, C.C., and Lea performed at Tate School recur throughout the novel: “Three little maids from school are we, / Pert as a schoolgirl well can be, / Fill’d to the brim with girlish glee— / Ev’rything is a source of fun. / Nobody’s safe, for we care for none!” Look at moments in the book when the song plays. What is the significance of the jammed tape? How have Audrey’s feelings changed about the song since the girls performed it together? How do the lyrics relate to their current situation and to the themes of the novel? What about the lyrics playing in Lea’s car on page 229 (“Non, je ne regrette rien / ‘I regret nothing’”)?
Soon after Audrey meets Wickham, he asks her to help him cheat on a Physics quiz. Why do you think Audrey does it? Is allowing Wickham to copy her quiz different from fixing his Physics paper? When Audrey tries to explain her reservations about cheating, Wickham claims that life isn’t fair—the “rules” aren’t always fair—and therefore, cheating isn’t always wrong. Do you think his argument is valid? Is Wickham’s cheating harmless? Why or why not?
Privacy is an important theme in the novel. When Clyde’s father discovers that Clyde used his computer program to look up Wickham, Theo, and Audrey, he says, “These are the personal lives of real people. People like you and me and your mother. Who shouldn’t have to think about strangers peeping through the keyhole” (p. 114). Was it wrong of Clyde to use the program? Was it wrong of him to let Audrey know what he found out about Wickham? The Yellow Paper is perhaps the most obvious example of invasion of privacy and exposure in the novel. How does it affect the students and teachers of Jemison High? Do you think Theo, Zondra, and Sands deserved to be outed? What about Mrs. Leacock? Compare Clyde’s looking up his three classmates to Brian’s creation of The Yellow Paper. How are their actions and consequences alike? How are they different?
When Clyde first sees Audrey’s house, he is dismayed to discover that her family is much wealthier than his. Compare Clyde and Wickham’s financial situations and attitudes toward money. Do you think it would matter to Audrey that Clyde isn’t as wealthy as she is? How does having (and losing, in Audrey’s case) money affect the three girls?
As Wickham and Audrey sit in her car, kissing and watching the snow, she thinks, “This is like being inside the most wonderful snow globe” (p. 139). Toward the end of the novel, Wickham stares out the window of his room, “wishing it would snow and cover the yellow lawn and the dirty street and the bare hedge with white and white and more white” (p. 297). Snow is an important symbol in the novel. Find some other passages in which snow appears, and discuss its significance. How does it reflect the way the characters feel? What does it represent for Audrey? For Wickham? For Clyde, whose mind is on the upcoming lilacs? Consider the last line of the novel, “In Jemison, it was snowing again.” Why do you think the authors chose to end this way?
On page 136, Audrey calls Wickham her “own personal Cary Grant.” When they watch Suspicion, the movie in which Cary Grant’s character is suspected of murdering his friend, Audrey comments, “It’s kind of creepy not knowing whether to trust Cary Grant or not” (p. 137). Discuss the importance of this scene. How does it relate to Audrey and Wickham? To the themes of trust and betrayal in the novel? Do you think Audrey has suspicions about Wickham over the course of their relationship? Did you?
Audrey, Wickham, and Clyde all have to deal with their parents’ problems to some extent, in addition to their own. Discuss the relationships the three have with their parents. How are Audrey, Wickham, and Clyde affected by their parents’ actions and circumstances?
The authors often give us two or more sides of the same story. For example, in chapter 41, Audrey reads the article about Wickham’s accident, and then in chapter 55, called “Wickham’s Version,” Audrey gets his side of the story, in his own words. In the next chapter, Wickham thinks to himself that “he should have told her everything,” and then we as readers finally get the real story. How do the three versions of the accident differ? Do you think if Wickham had told Audrey everything, things would have ended differently for the two of them? Find and discuss some other examples of multiple perspectives in the novel. Why do you think Mrs. Leacock feels the need to tell Audrey her side of the story about her husband?
Lea is a quiet, sweet, “innocent” character throughout the novel. Is her behavior at the end surprising? Audrey feels as if Lea has betrayed her—do you think Lea sees it this way? Does she feel guilty for her actions? Lea says to Wickham, “You and I see each other’s secrets, and people who see each other’s secrets should face the fact that they’re always going to be together” (p. 295). What does she mean by this? Do you think their relationship will last?
Why is “Crushed” an appropriate title for this novel? Find and discuss some examples of characters being “crushed.” On page 307, Mrs. Leacock says, “We’re all crushed at some time or other. It’s true that some of us never recover our size and shape, but most of us do.” Do you think Audrey will bounce back from the pain Wickham and Lea caused her? Will Mrs. Leacock recover? Will Clyde?
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA AND TOM McNEAL
A CONVERSATION WITH LAURA AND TOM McNEAL
Q: What is the writing process for you both like? Do you switch off every other chapter, or write together?
A: Laura: The first time we wrote a novel together (Crooked), we switched back and forth. I wrote a chapter from the girl’s point of view and then Tom wrote the next chapter in the boy’s voice, and so on. It was fun but a little li
ke knitting a sweater without a pattern. The first draft was four sizes too large.
Now we write outlines and talk about what we think is going to happen in the end. We still take turns, but we write longer segments, sixty or eighty pages. When one person is absolutely sick of the characters and disheartened about the plot, it’s time to trade. Taking a month or two away from the story and then coming back to it, finding it transformed and improved by the other person, is extremely rejuvenating. It’s like the elves and the shoemaker. You go to bed, and when you wake up, someone has turned your leather into shoes.
Q: Where do you get your writing done, and how do you manage to do that with two children at home?
A: Tom: We don’t work on fiction in the house, and we don’t do it full-time. I’m a partner in a family business, which can be fairly demanding, so I normally only work on fiction two mornings a week and on weekends. Laura works only when the children are at school or with a babysitter—ten to fifteen hours a week initially, now roughly twenty.
When the children were small enough to be home with a babysitter, it was essential to be out of sight (and beyond earshot). We started working in separate but adjoining rooms of the guesthouse, and that’s where we still work now that the children are in school. We can’t see each other, but we can call to each other through an open door.
Q: Did you both always know that you wanted to be writers, and to write for young adult readers?
A: Laura: It wasn’t always crystal clear. Tom’s unlikely childhood dream was to be a veterinarian by day and nightclub singer at night, and I planned to be a forest ranger, but my mother has saved very early attempts at picture books and embarrassing poems, and Tom was the sports editor for his junior high, high school, and college newspapers. Young adult novels just turned out to be the form in which we could work together, stay offstage, and avoid sleeping in the woods.