Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “It’s just for networking, you know? That’s basically the whole point. Did you know that if you get into Skull and Bones, you’re basically automatically in the CIA?”

  “Since when do you want to be in the CIA?” I asked her. “I thought you were going pre-med.”

  “I am,” Anjali said. “I’m just saying.”

  “She could be a doctor for the CIA,” Emma reasoned, and Deena laughed.

  “She could reprogram enemy agents,” Deena said, grinning. “Then send them back behind the lines where they’ll be like a sleeper cell ready to activate when they hear the secret password.”

  “And the secret word would be?” Emma asked.

  “Jason,” I said, sending Emma and Deena into fits of giggles.

  “You guys, shut up!” Anjali said, turning around and hitting my arm. “You are so gross.”

  She was pretending to be upset, but she was smiling. Being the only one of us with a boyfriend came with the assumption that it was her privilege to let us tease her.

  “Jason is so gross,” I clarified as Deena said, “Mmm-hmm,” and shot Anjali her We keep telling you look. That look is deadly.

  The bell rang just as Father Molloy strode in, clapping his hands and saying, “All right, girls, let’s take it down a notch.”

  Father Molloy is the kind of priest that my mother likes to call “Father Oh Well.” That’s such a Rowley family Irish name joke. Pathetic. Anyway, she says that because she thinks he’s cute, and I guess he sort of is except for he’s really old, like, forty. He perched with one knee up on the edge of the desk and frowned at the roll sheet. I don’t even know why he was bothering, since I don’t think we had any new girls this late in the year. We’d already had him for eighth-grade catechism anyway, most of us.

  While he was distracted, Anjali pulled her phone out of her sweater pocket and slid it under the lid of her desk. There’s a pretty intense “no cell phones in class” policy at St. Joan’s, and Anjali is a prime offender. She can text without looking, which she swears is easy, though I’ve never been able to do it. They had taken at least two phones away from her in the previous semester that I know of, and when they take your phone away, they actually keep it. What I couldn’t believe was that Anjali’s parents kept buying her new ones. My mother told me that if they ever took my phone away, I’d be buying the next one myself. Which is fine, except I don’t have three hundred dollars just kicking around. I now texted during class only in the event of a dire emergency. Anjali, though, she’s ridiculous. I peered over her shoulder to see what she was writing.

  “You shouldn’t text him back right away like that,” I whispered.

  “What?” Anjali whispered back.

  Father Molloy had started down the roll sheet for attendance, and girls were responding when he called their names.

  “Emma Blackburn?”

  “Here,” Emma said.

  “Jennifer Crawford?”

  “Here,” said the girl with pink-streaked hair and heavy eyeliner sitting in the back of the room.

  I leaned in closer so Anjali could hear me. “You should at least wait five minutes. Or, heck, wait ’til fifth period. Then he’ll appreciate it.”

  Deena had her eyes fixed straight ahead, but I could tell she was listening.

  “What for? I like him. If I text back quickly, I hear from him sooner,” Anjali said out of the side of her mouth.

  “But, Anj,” I said, leaning forward on my elbows hard enough to tip the desk. “You’ve got to—”

  “Critical commentary, Miss Rowley?”

  Crap.

  “No, Father Molloy.”

  He dropped the roll sheet on the desk and folded his arms. I’d seen him give other girls that look before, but I didn’t think he’d ever given it to me.

  “I’m sorry, but I think only half the room caught what you were saying,” he said. “Would you mind repeating it?”

  “I’m sorry? I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “Fair enough. Perhaps Miss Seaver in speech and debate didn’t cover projection. Stand up, if you will.”

  Double crap.

  “Chop chop,” said Father Molloy.

  I stood up, a whole roomful of girls whispering a decibel above silence, rows of wide-blinking eyes staring at me with pity and, in a few faces, delight. So far this year I was perfect: attendance, lateness, everything going seamlessly. I had two early decision deferrals to think about, and another dozen applications had gone out last week. Plus the thing with Fabiana. I needed to get out of this without it going down in writing. I tried to smile around the room, but the effort made my cheeks hurt.

  The priest cast an appraising eye up and down me, with a flicker of mirth in his eyes that let me know we were both in on the joke.

  “Perv,” I thought I heard Deena mutter.

  “Miss Rowley. As this is your senior year, and you’ve been a student at St. Joan’s since the Bush administration, I feel certain you are aware of the dress code?”

  I cleared my throat. “The dress code?” I echoed.

  “Next year you’ll be at whatever university will be fortunate enough to have you, and you will be free to wear as few scraps of handkerchief as you see fit. But at St. Joan’s, we still stubbornly insist that our students wear actual clothing. That skirt is—six inches, I believe? Seven?—above the knee. Roll it down, please.”

  Eight, actually. Okay, maybe more like nine. I reached to my waistband and tugged to bring it back down to regulation length. All around me, girls with rolled waistbands shifted in their seats, some pulling down the ends of their cardigans to cover the evidence. I didn’t see why he’d want to call me out on some BS skirt-rolling. Everybody does it. They start doing it in middle school.

  “Thank you. Now then,” he said. “Would you mind repeating your comment to Miss Gupta just now? The suspense is killing us.”

  Anjali squeaked and pressed her lips together, since I’m sure she was afraid I’d rat her out about the phone. I opened my mouth to speak, not really clear about what was going to come out, when the door to advisory clicked open and I was momentarily spared while we all dropped everything to watch Clara Rutherford come into class.

  The first thing to know about Clara is that I like her. I really do. And she likes me too. We’re not not friends or anything like that. That was the crazy thing about Clara—pretty much everybody liked her. She was so nice that I kind of wished I could hate her, if for no other reason than that she was definitely nicer than me. But as much as I may have wanted to, I couldn’t quite hate her. I don’t think I’d ever seen her get mad or lose her temper at anyone. She wasn’t friendly, exactly. There were plenty of girls at St. Joan’s who thought that being friendly to everyone, even people they hated, would make them popular. Instead they just came off as insincere, and fewer people wound up liking them than if they’d just acted normal.

  That wasn’t Clara’s style. Instead she had this air about her, as though there was always a red velvet carpet rolling out under her feet. She did okay in classes, but not so well that anyone would resent her, or feel like she was so much smarter than them that it was annoying. She played field hockey well enough that everyone wanted to have her on their team, but not so well that anyone would find a reason to high-stick her in the face. She even managed to look cute in the field hockey skirts, which really killed me, because I had a serious complex about my knees. Her hair was just the right length, with just the right amount of wave, and with a reddish-nut hue that glowed. Clara didn’t even have to straighten her hair, which I could admit envying about her. Mine springs straight out in dark corkscrews all over my head, so that half my childhood was spent with my mother ripping a hairbrush through thick snarls, saying I looked like the teenage bride of Frankenstein. It wasn’t until last year that I finally figured out the stuff to use to get them to fall in spirals.

 
It was like Clara Rutherford belonged to some other species, one that didn’t sweat or smell or have anything go seriously wrong in its life. Her family, as far as I knew, was wealthy, and happy, and healthy, with a chocolate-haired mother who manned booths at school fund-raisers and a squash-playing father who actually came to some of her field hockey games. She had a brother who was in Emma’s brother’s class, as unblemished and likeable as she was, who played lacrosse and did student council and threw one memorable party after graduation where there may have been some drinking, but no one got in any serious trouble, and everyone just had a good time. Clara had it all figured out.

  Of course, not everybody liked Clara. When a girl’s on a pedestal, there’s nothing some people would like better than to shove her off it, just to know what kind of noise she’d make when she shattered.

  Emma’s face didn’t change when Clara came in. Instead her gray eyes seemed to glimmer, like light on the inside of an oyster shell.

  But I saw Deena’s smile slip. I thought she was a little jealous of Clara, which I didn’t understand, because Deena was so funny and talented and it’s not like she wasn’t popular too. But she had heard that Clara was also applying to Tufts, and now Deena was paranoid that Clara would take her spot. Most of the colleges we were all looking at had quotas for the kids they’d take from the top private schools. It was going to be a tense three months in advisory if both of them were waiting to hear from Tufts.

  And then there was Jennifer Crawford, with the pink hair. When Clara walked in, Jennifer’s lip curled like she was looking at a roadkill fox. Disgust and loathing.

  Jennifer had issues.

  So Clara walked in, and it was like we all paused for a moment of silence to appreciate that she’d decided to join us.

  Our eyes tracked Clara as she moved to her seat, followed closely by her two Clara-clones. All three of them were wearing low ponytails tied with thin black ribbon. I could feel us all register this information, could almost hear the click of the data being recorded in every girl’s head, and wondered how many low-ribboned ponytails we’d see at assembly after lunch. A lot, I was guessing.

  “Miss Rowley?”

  I jumped, shaken out of staring at Clara Rutherford, who had settled in the seat at the front of the room nearest the window.

  “Your comments to Miss Gupta. We’re on the edge of our seats.”

  I glanced down at Anjali, who was sliding her phone up the inside sleeve of her sweater where it would be safe.

  “I’m sorry, Father Molloy,” I said, looking straight ahead. “But I wasn’t saying anything. I just dropped my pen, and leaned over to pick it up. It probably looked like I was talking.”

  The priest rolled his eyes heavenward and sighed. We both knew I was full of it. I almost respected him more for knowing how full of it I was.

  “Have it your way,” he said, waving a dismissive hand.

  I dropped into my seat, hunching my shoulders to make myself smaller behind Anjali. I just needed a break from being looked at for one second.

  “Okay. I’m afraid we’ve got some stuff to discuss today, so listen up,” Father Molloy said.

  Groans of annoyance rumbled through the classroom, and Deena and I shared an irritated look. Her hand twitched on her physics textbook, and my own hands were itching to double-check my calc problem set. Usually advisory was the prime time for cramming for tests or finishing up work from the previous night. I was pretty sure of my work, but I couldn’t recheck it too many times. Anyway, there was never any actual advising that took place in advisory.

  “I’m sure a lot of you have questions and concerns,” he began. “And we’re going to do everything that we can to address them. But the important thing at this juncture is for me to emphasize that the school cares about you all. At this time there is no reason for any of you to be worried. No reason whatsoever.”

  “What is he talking about?” Deena whispered in my ear.

  “Hell if I know,” I said.

  I brought a pencil up and held it between my upper lip and my nose, and spaced out a little. Deena inspected her fingernails. Anjali had edged her phone into her palm and was texting again while pretending to absorb every word Father Molloy was saying.

  “St. Joan’s prides itself on being a place where the students come first,” he droned on. “We know it’s unnerving, and so I want to encourage anyone who wants to speak to a teacher in private not to hesitate. You can come talk to me, or if you’d feel more comfortable, maybe with a woman, for instance, we can connect you with someone.”

  The class was starting to get fidgety, but he wasn’t ready to let us off the hook yet. “Are there any questions?” Father Molloy said, folding his arms over his chest and looking at us.

  I inclined my head over to Emma, about to ask if she had any idea what he meant, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring at the front corner of the room, her cheeks flushed a splotchy pink, and gripping her pen so hard, her knuckles were turning white.

  My gaze swiveled, following Emma’s stare over the heads of my classmates to the hallowed corner where Clara Rutherford sat, her desk practically bearing a little RESERVED card written in calligraphy.

  And that was the first time that I saw Clara Rutherford twitch.

  Chapter 2

  DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 2012

  Twitch is not the right word. It’s the word the media would start to use when things really got going, when they needed a word that wasn’t too sensational, because everyone was afraid that sensationalizing what was happening would just make it worse. But twitch does not even begin to describe what happened to Clara Rutherford that morning.

  Her face seized up, as though an invisible person standing next to her had hooked his fingers in her mouth, trying to peel the skin from her skull. Her hands clenched closed, flew up to her chest, and vibrated under her chin. By the time Father Molloy got to her, her legs had started shaking so violently that she rattled off her chair and fell to the floor, flopping and gasping like a fish.

  “Colleen, get the nurse,” Father Molloy commanded, sounding surprisingly calm.

  Half the classroom was standing up, staring down at Clara. We couldn’t believe it was happening. We wouldn’t have been able to believe it anyway, but it was somehow even more wrong that it was happening to Clara. Her feet kicked like someone getting electroshock. Seeing her perfection split apart like that made us panicky.

  “Now, Colleen!” the priest said, raising his voice.

  He knelt beside her, cradling her head, with his thumb in her mouth to keep her tongue depressed. The last thing I saw before I fled for the door was Clara’s front teeth biting down on Father Molloy’s thumb. She was making horrible gagging, gurgling sounds, as though she were drowning.

  I sprinted down the upper school hallway, my footfalls echoing on the flagstones, running past the vacant student center, skidding on the rug outside the upper school dean’s office, ignoring the administrative assistant who stood up and hollered, “Walk, Colleen!”

  I rounded the corner from the upper school hallway to the old wing, my shadow stretching long down the hall, so distorted I felt like I was falling into it. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat as I ran down the corridor that used to house the convent bedrooms, all of them so long locked that the doors were rusted shut. At the very end of the hallway one door stood open, with warm light spilling out. I landed at the nurse’s office, panting for breath on the doorjamb. Inside, half behind a white partition, the nurse was pulling a thermometer out of the mouth of a green-faced eighth grader.

  The school nurse would be famous within the week, but on this Wednesday I have to confess that I didn’t remember her name. She was new, and young—so young, I found it weird to address her with a title. She looked like she could be in my class.

  When she saw me, she stood up immedia
tely and said, “What’s the matter?”

  “You’ve got to come! Room 709. Hurry!”

  By the time we burst back into the classroom, Clara was sitting up, her hair disheveled, breathing heavily and looking around with wide, baffled eyes. Father Molloy stood up when he saw us and pulled the nurse aside. They conferred for an urgent minute by the door while I crouched next to Clara. She looked up at me, her eyes shining with confusion. She moved her mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, touching her arm. “I brought the nurse. You’re going to be okay.”

  She nodded, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “Colleen,” the nurse said, placing her hand on my back. “Will you return to your desk, please?”

  I hesitated.

  “Girls, I know you’re all worried, but we need to give her some air. Back to your desks, please,” the nurse insisted.

  I felt someone helping me to my feet and back to my desk. Slowly I lowered into my seat, still watching Clara. She was looking around on the floor, as if she were afraid she’d dropped something but didn’t know what.

  “That was crazy!” Anjali whispered.

  “Oh my God, do you think she’s going to be okay?” Deena said.

  None of us could even pretend we weren’t staring. The nurse leaned over Clara, shining a penlight into each of her eyes, taking her pulse, listening to her heart.

  “Oh, she’ll be fine,” Emma said with a wave of her hand.

  “Does she have epilepsy or something?” I asked. “Does this, like, happen all the time, do you think?”

  I couldn’t imagine Clara having something seriously wrong with her. We’d all have known about it if she did. St. Joan’s was a small school. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. We knew who was diabetic, and whose mom drank too much. We knew who had a gluten allergy, and who just said she did to hide her eating disorder. We knew who cut. We knew about everyone’s tattoos, and we thought they should probably have gone into Boston to get them instead, ’cause the lines were already blurry. We knew within the week when one of us lost her virginity. Sometimes we knew within the hour.