Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “Sure you will.” She smiled out of the side of her mouth and took another long toke on her joint. “Anyway, those interviews don’t even really matter.” She said this casually, a reassurance for herself. But also a pinprick for me.

  I was trying to come up with something encouraging to say, or barring that, something sufficiently self-deprecating, when I felt the atmosphere in the car plunge in a sudden chill. The air pressure changed, as though the barometer had fallen.

  “It’s him,” Emma said.

  “Who?” I asked, following Emma’s stare.

  “Mr. Mitchell,” she said.

  Sure enough, the slim figure of our AP US History teacher was loping down the sidewalk, coming from the direction of Clara’s house. Mr. Mitchell’s hands were thrust in his jacket pockets, and his head was ducked down in thought. He looked different, and I realized it was because he wasn’t in a jacket and tie like he wore at school. He wore a motorcycle jacket and jeans. His hair was sloppy.

  Emma palmed the joint and slouched down in the passenger seat of my station wagon.

  “That’s weird,” I said, watching him pass. I’d forgotten how cute he was. He looked younger, dressed like that.

  “Shh!” Emma hushed me, sinking lower.

  “He doesn’t look like he’s been sick or anything,” I remarked.

  As I spoke, he paused, looking out over the water, its waves glittering under the starlight, and ran his hand across the back of his neck. Even through the darkness I could see he looked upset about something. Almost like he’d been crying.

  “Will you shut up?” Emma hissed, grabbing for my shoulder and dragging me down out of sight lines with the park.

  “What? He can’t see us. It’s night,” I pointed out, struggling up on one elbow so that I could finish watching him pass by.

  He considered the ocean for a long moment, breeze ruffling his hair, before continuing on, his eyes on his feet. Mr. Mitchell never glanced at our car. After a few minutes he was swallowed by shadow and disappeared. I sat all the way back up, staring down the block to the last corner where I’d seen him.

  “Why do you suppose he hasn’t come back, Em?” I asked, bringing a knuckle up to my mouth for a thoughtful chew.

  Emma didn’t answer. When I looked over at the passenger seat, I saw Emma sitting with her hands over her face. A wet snuffling sound was coming from behind her hands.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s it. We’re going to the Shanty.”

  The Shanty is about the size of my closet, and my closet isn’t exactly a walk-in. It’s this lobster place on Artists’ Row in Salem, and has a vibe about it that I particularly like. I found a spot on Essex Street, got us out of the car, and steered Emma by her elbow. She wiped her face on her sweater sleeves and slurped the snot into the back of her throat. There never was an uglier crier than Emma Blackburn. I’m serious: her whole face just folds in on itself and her eyelids puff up and she looks like a completely different person.

  “Hey, Leland,” I said to the recalcitrant owner of the Shanty.

  He grunted in greeting. We took one of the plate-sized tables in back, close to the lobster tank. I plopped Emma down and stuffed a fistful of paper napkins into her hands, and she buried her nose in them. Two menus were slapped on our table, followed by two sets of silverware in a defensive heap.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma bubbled. She blew her nose with a honk.

  “Shh,” I said.

  Leland came back with a pad. “Get you girls something?”

  “Yeah. Two beers, please. Sam Winter?”

  “Hmph,” Leland said. “Anything to eat?”

  I looked at Emma, who slumped in her chair like a potted plant someone forgot to water.

  “Just some sweet-potato chips. Thanks.”

  Another grunt, and Leland withdrew.

  I turned to Emma.

  “I think you should lay off that stuff. Seriously. It just makes you paranoid and depressed.”

  Emma smiled wanly at me and blew her nose again. On the television screen behind the softly bubbling lobster tank, the evening news began. TJ Wadsworth, in a deep violet suit this time, was reporting on a house fire in Peabody the previous night.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I just hate this. Don’t you hate this?”

  “Hate what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. This. Everything. It’s all ending. I don’t want it to change. Do you?” Emma’s eyes were rimmed in red, and she looked at me, pleading. But the truth was, I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why she was so afraid.

  “Um. I do, actually. Kind of,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “No!” she cried. “I hate that everyone’s going to move away next year. I hate the idea of leaving my parents alone. I wish everything could just stay the same. I like it here. I like things as they are. I don’t want it to be different!”

  We were interrupted by two pint glasses plunked down in front of us, with a basket of sweet-potato chips dropped in between. I took a sip and grimaced.

  Root beer.

  Leland smirked at me and said, “You want me to run you a tab?”

  I scowled at him, and he went away chuckling.

  Emma took a sip of her root beer and piled some sweet-potato chips into her mouth. We chewed in silence while the weatherman pointed out a cold front that would be dropping up to three inches of snow on the Eastern Seaboard, beginning the next day. Emma wiped her mouth and face with more paper napkins and raised raw eyes to the television screen.

  “My head’s killing me,” she remarked.

  “You’re probably just dehydrated from all that crying,” I said. But I wasn’t really listening.

  Over our heads the news crawl announced that the St. Joan’s Academy Mystery Illness, once thought to be an isolated outbreak of sensitivity to a batch of vaccines in a small handful of local pediatricians’ offices, had spread.

  To eight.

  Part 3

  Mid-February

  LUPERCALIA

  The magistrate sits in your heart, that judges you.

  ELIZABETH PROCTOR

  THE CRUCIBLE, ACT 2

  Chapter 13

  DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2012

  There,” my mother said, plucking a fluff of lint from the front of my sweater. “No, wait.” She licked her thumb and then wiped something off my cheek.

  “Mom! Come on!” I reached up to dry the streak of her spit on my skin. But I actually felt better.

  “Let me look.” She stepped back and surveyed me, tugging and adjusting. Mom and I were the same height, and her hair was like a steel-streaked, unraveled version of mine. We had the same green eyes, but her freckles were darker.

  Cardigan, wool skirt, tights, ankle boots, peacoat, new scarf, hat with wool flower. Good Coach handbag from the outlet store. Makeup, but not too much of it. Hair with the right stuff in it to make it fall in spirals. If Emma were here, she’d pull one curl and make it bounce.

  “Think it’s okay?” I asked.

  My mother fussed with my curls and smiled proudly at me. “You look darling.”

  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to look darling. I thought I’d rather look collegiate. Intellectual.

  “Maybe I should wear my glasses instead of my contacts.”

  “Nonsense. You look fine. Now, do you have everything? Transcript? Résumé?” Mom hunted in her pockets as though she were the one heading to her college interview instead of me. “What about a copy of your personal essay?”

  “She said I didn’t need to bring any of that stuff. She doesn’t need it.”

  “Are you positive?” I could tell my mother was worried about me confronting the Harvard interviewer without a portfolio of achievements for us to discuss. But I liked that Judith Pennepacker wanted to meet me, rather than some list of th
ings I’d done.

  “We’d better go or you’ll miss your train,” Dad said as he passed through the kitchen.

  Michael slouched at the kitchen table, earbuds in ears, reading a book, head nodding in rhythm. Maybe there was actually music playing in the earbuds this time.

  “Where’s Wheez?” I asked.

  “Oh,” my mother said, waving her hand. “Around. Are you really sure you don’t need to bring anything? Maybe you should pack a résumé, just in case. So you have it.”

  She thrust the folded packet of my St. Joan’s dossier into my hand, and I accepted it with a roll of my eyes. It was easier to take it than to argue.

  “Train, Colleen!” my father called from the mudroom.

  “Coming!” I called back.

  I cast a look at Michael, and he glanced at me quickly before returning to his book. Under the kitchen table he pulled out his new cell phone and texted something, not meeting my eyes.

  On my way out the front door a voice from inside the coats hanging thick and puffy on the pegs in the mudroom said, “Good luck, Colleen! I like your hat. Can I have it?”

  “Sure,” I said with a smile. “When I get back. Bye, Wheez.”

  The day was blistering gray and cold, but even in the grimmest doldrums of February, Harvard Square was ablur with people. I always felt a charge of excitement in the Square, but today the quality of that excitement was subtly different. For the first time I allowed myself to pretend that I might be one of the students I saw hurrying off to class, or one of the glamorous girls out on Friday night, tottering over brick sidewalks in high heels with a tiny coat over an even tinier dress.

  I was early, hanging around, gazing into the windows of the Coop. The sign said next month there was going to be some professor from Northeastern there, giving a talk. That would be crazy, having to give a talk in front of people like that. I guessed professors spoke in front of people all the time. But still.

  A sharp wind kicked up, tumbling wet leaves and bits of paper down the street, blowing up my legs and under my skirt. I shivered. My knees were getting numb. It was too cold to kill time outside. I still had fifteen minutes before my interview, but I thought I’d go to Dado Tea anyway and loiter. She wouldn’t know it was me, anyway, right? No big deal.

  I hunched my shoulders to my ears and leaned into the wind, my hands bunched in my pockets, as I made my way to the café. Inside my coat pocket, my phone vibrated with a text received. I pulled the phone out to see what was up. Spence and I had already made a plan to get together about an hour after my interview. Maybe he was writing to wish me luck.

  It wasn’t from Spence. The number said UNKNOWN.

  The play. I’m serious. Look at it.

  I frowned.

  I’m pretty stressed right now, Whoeveryouare. Stop bothering me.

  I stared at the phone, wind tangling my spiral curls into a cloud around my ears. A full minute passed, by the clock on my phone. No response.

  Grumbling, I thrust the phone back in my pocket and kept trudging to the café.

  It was packed when I got there, warm with bodies, crowded with coats hung over the backs of chairs, and after I ordered my tea at the standing bar, I scanned the room looking for a woman who might resemble Judith Pennepacker’s staid Facebook photo. At first I didn’t see anyone I recognized. My gaze slid over the faces, lots of teacher types, with piles of papers to grade under their mugs of coffee. I stumbled momentarily over a face that I half recognized, but rejected it as belonging to a stranger. Then I looked again.

  The face belonged to a young, clean-cut guy in a sport coat and tie spotted with tiny ducks in flight, sitting at a table with a woman whose back was to me. All I could see of her was a heavy brown French braid, tied with a scrunchie. I frowned, trying to place him. Was he one of the guys in my class at St. Innocent’s? No. But he definitely looked . . . Wait . . .

  The guy must have sensed me looking at him, because he met my gaze and his face drained of all its color as he recognized me.

  Jason Rothstein. Anjali’s Andover yo-boy boyfriend. Meeting with Judith Pennepacker for his Harvard interview.

  I opened my mouth in a silent laugh, pointed at him to make him feel even more embarrassed, and then turned my back, sipping a bubble tea and waiting my turn at the pillory.

  I was slurping the last taro milk from the bottom of my tea glass when I sensed someone standing at my elbow.

  “Hi, Jason,” I said. “Nice sport coat.”

  “Hey, Colleen. ’Sup?”

  “Don’t even try to fist-bump me, okay?”

  He snorted and ordered a tea of his own.

  “How was Judith Pennepacker? She as tough as she seems?”

  “Tougher,” he said.

  “Terrific.”

  “Oh, like you have anything to worry about. Jesus. Give it a rest, Colleen. On the real.”

  I glanced at Jason, surprised. He sounded genuinely irritated.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning his profile to me. “It’s supposed to mean nothing.”

  I considered asking him what his problem was. But I didn’t particularly want to get into it with him, not when Judith Pennepacker was waiting for me at a table fifteen feet away.

  “Okay. Well, I’ve got to go,” I said, tossing some money on the tea bar. “Hope your interview went okay. Tell Anj I said hi.”

  “Colleen,” he said, putting out a hand as though to stop me.

  “What?”

  “You talk to Anj today?”

  “Anjali? No. Not since Friday. Why?”

  Jason looked abashed. “She’s not returning my texts.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not returning your texts?”

  Anjali could have both her arms encased completely in plaster casts and she’d find a way to text Jason every five minutes. She’d text with her toes. I only just thought that, but upon reflection, I bet Anjali totally could text with her toes. I should ask her if she can do that.

  Jason’s face took on a stricken cast, and I was puzzled. I guess I knew Jason was really into her. Didn’t I? Maybe I was too busy being distracted by how much I disapproved of him to see that. My cheeks flushed. I didn’t like Jason any more than before, but it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t just a manipulative appendage attached to my friend. I stared at him, seeing for the first time that Jason was actually a person. A nervous boy.

  “I been texting her all day, you know, like we do. And she ain’t returned a single one. You think she’s mad at me? She usually got no trouble letting me know, when she is.”

  Of course, on the one hand, I’d have liked nothing better than for Anjali to break up with Jason. But his face looked so wounded-puppy sad, and his grammar kept slipping between Andover and Brooklyn-on-TV. Jason actually seemed upset.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “Did you try calling? Maybe her folks put her on a limited data plan, and she’s over the limit already.”

  Jason’s face flooded with relief. “Oh, yeah, that’s gotta be it, yo. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “Yeah. There’s other ways of communicating with people besides texting, Jason. You could, like, actually pick up the phone. You could call her.”

  He smirked and punched me lightly on the arm.

  “Colleen. My shortie.”

  I shook my head and said, “For Pete’s sake. I’ve got to go.”

  “Your stuff’s tight, yo. Peace out.”

  “Thank you? I think?”

  He laughed and said, “You’ll do great. You’ll kick my ass. Go on with your bad self.”

  I smiled at him, collected my almost-empty tea glass, and went to join Judith Pennepacker for the most important interview of my life.

  Okay, so she wasn’t that bad. I was so keyed up that most of it wound up
being kind of a blur. Judith Pennepacker looked younger than her picture, despite the scrunchie, and she asked me some pretty hard-core questions, like why was I only vice president of the debate club and not president (because Mr. Mitchell picked someone else, thanks for bringing that up), and what I thought the point of college athletics was, if any (huh?), and how realistic were my chances at valedictorian.

  I hated talking about valedictorian. It was just kind of embarrassing, admitting that I wanted it so badly. I didn’t want to jinx it. And it was tricky, because I was within a tenth of a point of Fabiana, and so every tiny assignment mattered. I decided early on that I couldn’t think about it too much or I’d psych myself out. Anyone could see why the Mystery Illness was something I couldn’t deal with thinking about. I had enough on my mind.

  So I wasn’t too pleased when Judith Pennepacker asked me about it. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. It’s pretty typical for college interviewers to ask us about current events and expect us to have some well-formed opinions. But usually the questions are more along the lines of politics or international affairs. Instead Judith Pennepacker said this, and I quote:

  “Seems like there’s a little hysteria problem at your school. Would you care to comment on that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hysteria. These things are more common than you might realize, though it’s been a while since we had one in Massachusetts. What are your thoughts on the St. Joan’s Mystery Illness?”

  I was torn. There was what the school had told us. There was what I’d heard. And there was what they’d asked me in the meeting with the school nurse and the suit woman. Were those things the same?

  “Well,” I said, “the general consensus seems to be that everyone’s suffering from an allergic reaction to a vaccine.”

  “Sure. And do you think it’s a coincidence that the vaccine in question guards against a sexually transmitted disease?”

  Judith Pennepacker clearly had drawn some of her own conclusions about our Mystery Illness.

  “There’s a long history of adults being anxious about teenage girls’ sexuality,” I said, sounding like a women’s studies major. “And hysteria, as I understand it, is a largely nineteenth-century psychological phenomenon that’s also connected to fears of women’s bodies and sex. But I have to say, from what I’ve seen, that what’s happening at St. Joan’s definitely looks like a real illness. It’s not like they’re making it up or anything.”