Conversion (3 page)

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2012

A
t that point everything still could have gone back to normal.

I mean, we’d have gossiped about Clara for a while, and the senior girls who weren’t in our advisory would have wanted to know all the gory details, and it’s possible that someone (cough cough Jennifer Crawford, hello) would have posted a picture of Clara convulsing on the floor on Instagram and then everyone would have freaked out about her privacy being violated, but then it would have finally blown over. A month, tops, we’d have talked about it, and probably not even that long, before we all sank into our own end-of-high-school worlds, with college acceptances and parties and the spring formal and GPAs and AP exams and guys and other things to gossip about and distract us. I’d have remembered that Wednesday as Clara Rutherford’s first fall from the pedestal, which was without question a remarkable thing, but that’s all.

There was only a hall’s length between advisory and first period, but a hall’s length can be a long time at St. Joan’s. Any number of things could happen in the time it took to go from one end of the hall to the other.

We four broke apart within the crush of girls. Anjali was off to physics lab, Deena to Calculus BC. Emma and I usually sat together in AP US History. Our class was a pretty tight-knit group of history kids, as we’d been together in the advanced humanities classes all four years: history, English, French, Latin. Most of us had even taken AP Art History, which was an elective, but we’d be crazy not to take it, ’cause all we did was hang out at the Museum of Fine Arts and stare at pretty paintings. If I played my cards right, I’d leave St. Joan’s with nine AP exams, and if I scored well enough, that was almost two semesters of college credit. Plus, AP classes weighted your GPA, which was key for valedictorian. Jennifer Crawford was in AP US, too, and for some reason she was less annoying in history class. She would actually talk to us, for one thing. She could be so standoffish the rest of the time.

Most schools do AP US in junior year, but at St. Joan’s they save it for senior year. Getting into AP was a pretty big deal—they limit it to twelve slots, and we took an exam the summer before to place in. Every year a couple of girls flamed out, unable to take the pressure. Some of them even left the school. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.

AP US was a choice class, though, mainly because of Mr. Mitchell. He was much cooler than the other teachers, maybe because he was so young. He ran our class like a college seminar, with our desks in a circle, and he emphasized getting us to be able to argue our positions about what we read. We could tell he really listened to us when we were talking. He looked us in the eye.

Some people thought he was kind of cute, and I guess he was, in a hipster-nerd sort of way. Floppy James Franco hair and skinny 1950s ties. Glasses. He went to Harvard, so sometimes we’d even run into him in the Square on the weekend, and it was like spotting a celebrity. We’d laugh and wave and then run away giggling, wondering who he was with and what he was doing and if he had a girlfriend. Before the AP exam every year he had the whole class over to his apartment to cram, and he’d make weird early American food, like Indian pudding and corn pone and dandelion salad, and then after the exam he’d have everyone over again to show
The Last of the Mohicans
with sarcastic commentary about all the historical inaccuracies. I heard a rumor that he bought beer for last year’s post-exam party, but I don’t think it’s true.

Emma and I were dissecting what had just happened to Clara when Jennifer Crawford leaned over. Up close her pink hair looked dry and fried, sticky, like cotton candy. I didn’t know why she’d want to do that to herself. She could’ve been almost pretty if she’d just tried to look halfway normal.

“That was intense,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “We were just saying.”

“It’s all over Facebook already,” Jennifer said, flashing us her phone.

“What are people saying about it?” Emma asked, eyeing Jennifer’s phone.

Jennifer slipped it into her purse with a quick glance at the classroom door.

“Just that it was totally crazy, and nobody’s seen anything like that before.”

“Do people know what’s happening?” I asked. “Is she going to the hospital or something?”

“Oh, she doesn’t need a hospital. She was fine when we left advisory.” That was Emma.

“A couple people were saying she’s going to the hospital, but the Other Jennifer said her dad’s coming to pick her up.”

“Dang,” I said. “Poor Clara.”

“It’s Elizabeth and the Other Jennifer you should feel sorry for,” Jennifer Crawford said with a curl of her lip. She leaned back, coiling a hank of pink hair around one finger. “What are they going to do with no one telling them where to sit at lunch?”

“Come on, Jennifer,” I said. “Can you try to not be a total bitch for, like, five minutes?”

But Emma was silently laughing behind the sleeve of her sweater.

I was eyeing Emma when the door opened to reveal not Mr. Mitchell, but some random woman with huge eyeglasses and an armful of papers that slipped loose while all twelve of us watched. I could feel us all deflate when it wasn’t him.

“Oh, dammit,” the woman said, pushing the door closed with a hip before bending to pick up each leaf one at a time. “Is this,” she spoke to the floor, waddling from paper to paper, “Room 811? AP US History?”

Curious glances crackled around the perimeter of the room, followed by shrugs and more than one surreptitious peek at a cell phone. It took us a minute to realize no one had answered the random woman.

“Well?” she said, standing, the last reclaimed page jutting out from under one arm. She planted her free hand on her hip and looked annoyed. “Is it or isn’t it?”

“Ah,” someone stammered. “Yeah, this is 811.”

The woman gave us the once-over and—upon seeing the North Shore shipwreck map that Mr. Mitchell had hung behind his desk and the poster of the Gilbert Stuart George Washington portrait that they issue to every high school American history teacher at the same time they hand out the Tasers and Valium—decided she must be in the right place.

A hand tugged at my sleeve. Emma.

Where is he?
she mouthed.

I shrugged.
Dunno,
I mouthed back.
Maybe he’s sick?

Lame,
she said, a line forming between her pale eyebrows.

The random woman stumped up to the front of the room, slapped her papers onto Mr. Mitchell’s desk, and hunted around on the desktop, as if she hoped she might discover an instruction manual there. Mr. Mitchell kept his desk as I imagined an intellectual does—chaotic, some of the papers stuck together with rings of coffee. There was even a magnifying glass on it, mounted on a brass stand.

“Okay,” she said, more to herself than to us. “Right. Let’s get started.”

She turned to the board and wrote
Ms. Slater
in cursive handwriting that drooped and melted at such a sharp angle that she had to bend over to finish the
R
.

“I’m Ms. Slater,” she said, resettling her glasses on her nose.

We all peered at her, squinting for clues. Our squinting didn’t accomplish much—she was still just some random woman in a ponytail and a gray dress. Some non-age, like maybe thirty-five.

“If you’ll all just pull out whatever you were supposed to have read for today, we’ll see where we are.”

“Excuse me, Miss Slater?” a girl in the back said as she raised her hand. Leigh Carruthers. The inevitable Leigh Carruthers.

“Ms.,” the random woman corrected her without looking up from the disorderly heap of papers where she was, I guessed, hunting for the roll sheet.

“
Miss
Slater,” Leigh said again. “Um, I have to leave early today? For an appointment? So I’m going to have to be going in, like, five minutes?”

The random woman looked up slowly, a wicked smile spreading across her face. When she smiled, she looked younger, and I felt myself smile, too. She had a tiny gap between her front teeth that made her look mischievous.

“Don’t like the ‘Ms.,’ eh, Miss Carruthers?” Ms. Slater said. “We can go with Doctor Slater, if you’d rather. That works for me, too.”

Leigh sat back.

“And I’m sure you’re aware that student appointments during school hours have to be cleared with the office first. Then they do this thing where they give all the teachers a list of who’s going where when, with stuff like your cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses so we know what you guys are up to. Including substitutes like me. You know that, right?”

Leigh. So busted.

“Yes,” Leigh said.

“Great,” said Ms. Slater. “Now, books out.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Emma tapping on her phone. She caught me looking, and slid it away quickly.

What are you doing?
I mouthed.

Unlike Anjali, Emma wasn’t much of a texter. Emma was too laconic for that. She usually waited for the world to come to her.

Nothing,
she mouthed back.

I frowned at her, but by then we were all rummaging in our shoulder bags and pulling out the play that we were supposed to be discussing that day. I’d read it. Most of us had, I think. It wasn’t bad. There was a pretty sordid love triangle right in the middle, which always helps.

“So, anyone want to fill me in on how this usually goes?” Ms. Slater asked.

While she spoke, she hoisted up the lectern that Mr. Mitchell had banished to the corner at the beginning of the semester, and heaved it to the table at the front of the room. The spectacle of a woman in a fitted dress and kitten heels carrying a huge wooden lectern in her arms should have been hilarious, but it was actually kind of badass.

“Um,” Emma hesitated. “Mr. Mitchell was going to hand back our quizzes today, I think.”

She looked around at us for confirmation, and we all nodded.

“And then we were going to start talking about the play. That’s our whole next unit.”

“The play?” Ms. Slater said.

She strode over to my desk and flipped the book faceup.

“
The Crucible,
huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re doing the Salem witch trials this month. Quiz next week, then short response paper due sometime after the quiz. That was what Mr. Mitchell said Monday.”

“If you’re doing the Salem witch trials, what the hell are you doing reading a play about the 1950s?”

We looked around, baffled. Ms. Slater didn’t wait for an answer.

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re not doing that. Put them away and get out your notebooks.”

A dull silence hung between us as we gaped at this random woman.

“Notebooks?” she prodded. “You use them to take notes in?”

Mr. Mitchell ran AP US like a seminar. Mostly we just sat around talking in a big group. Sometimes we’d argue for as long as twenty minutes before Mr. Mitchell cut in. Nobody took notes.

“No notebooks?” Ms. Slater said in response to our nonresponse, her other eyebrow creeping up her forehead to join the first one, twin crescent moons floating under her hairline.

“Laptops?”

I cleared my throat.

“St. Joan’s doesn’t permit laptop use during class time,” I said. “We can bring them, but they’re for writing papers and stuff in study hall and the library. Otherwise they think we’ll just mess around on the Web.”

“Well,” Ms. Slater said, leaning her elbows on the lectern. “They’re probably right. So. Here’s what we’re going to do. You”—she pointed at Leigh, paused, and then pointed at Jennifer Crawford—“and
you
will take the paper out of
that
printer”—more pointing—“and make sure everyone has three sheets. The rest of you, bust out your pens.”

Leigh and Jennifer stood, exchanging uncomfortable smiles.

“
The Crucible,
” Ms. Slater said with her back to us, writing a list of names on the blackboard while she spoke, “is a play from 1953 that is about anti-Communist anxiety in postwar American culture, and about the inscrutable Other lurking behind a seemingly unthreatening facade. And, because it’s Arthur Miller, it’s also about sex.”

When she said that, we all snickered. Ms. Slater pretended she hadn’t heard us.

“It’s a hugely important work of American literature, and I’m delighted that you’ve read it. But this is a history class. And in history class, we aren’t concerned with what Arthur Miller thinks about sex. In history class, we talk about what really happened.”

We all laughed with surprise. Ms. Slater didn’t talk like a regular teacher. Leigh raised her hand.

“Question, Miss Carruthers,” Ms. Slater said, pointing with her chalk.

“But isn’t
The Crucible,
like, about the Salem witch trials?” Leigh asked.

“No,” Ms. Slater said. “Its
setting
is the Salem witch trials. Different thing entirely.”

“But aren’t the characters all, like, real people?” Leigh pressed, looking confused.

“Nope,” Ms. Slater said.

She moved to the board and underlined one of the names that she’d written there:
Ann Putnam Jr.
Nobody in the play had that name.

She was at the point of saying something else when she was cut off by a shriek of sirens approaching the quad outside. The classroom full of girls froze, and the half of us by the door stood up en masse and hurried to the window, leaning over each other’s shoulders and pressing our cheeks to the leaded glass to see what was happening.

Hot red lights flashed across the window.

“What’s going on?” I asked, not expecting anyone to know, but asking just in case the universe felt like telling me.

“It’s Clara,” Jennifer Crawford breathed.

The other girls burst into a gossipy buzz.

Outside, an ambulance squealed onto the quad and bounced over the curb, squashing a forsythia as it skidded to a stop. A couple of bulky guys in jumpsuits leapt out of the ambulance and pulled out a gurney with automatic unfolding legs. Father Molloy jogged out to meet them, followed closely by the nun who was the upper school dean. There was some hand waving, the dean and Father Molloy pointing to the eastern wing of the high school. The jumpsuit guys hustled off.