Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  “Hmm,” Judith Pennepacker said, steepling her fingers in front of her mouth. “And that something has to be outside their bodies? It can’t be in their minds?”

  I frowned.

  “I suppose it could be. But the girls who have it—they’re not really that type.”

  “What—the type with minds?” the interviewer said, smiling.

  I was on the point of trying to explain about Clara Rutherford—was there ever a girl less prone to psychological problems?—but Judith Pennepacker looked conspicuously at her watch. It was a large-faced man’s watch, heavy and expensive, which looked kind of badass on her, with her skinny wrists.

  “I see that we’ve just about run out of time. Do you have any last questions for me about the undergraduate experience, or Harvard more generally?”

  That was my cue. I got to my feet.

  “I think you’ve answered all the questions that I had. I was particularly impressed with everything that you had to say about the house system. I have to say that Harvard seems like a remarkable place to attend college, and I so appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts on it with me.”

  I held out my hand and Judith Pennepacker took it. Her handshake was as firm as my dad’s.

  “The pleasure was mine, Colleen. Good luck with the rest of your semester. If you think of any other questions for me, don’t hesitate to e-mail.”

  E-mail! I beamed. That was a good sign. She liked me!

  I wound my scarf around my neck. I had an hour to kill before meeting Spence at the Coop. This was shaping up to be an ideal Sunday. That is, until I scooted my café chair back and rammed my elbow right into Judith Pennepacker’s next interviewee.

  “Ow, man,” said Spence, inhaling through his molars to hide the pain.

  “Oh!” I gasped. “It’s you!”

  “Hey. Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t want to freak you out,” he said, helping me out of my chair while pretending it didn’t hurt.

  Judith Pennepacker leaned back in her chair, with an appraising eye on us both.

  So he decided to not freak me out by surprising me? Great. Good move, preppy boy.

  I covered my consternation with a new, more formal version of my usual smile, and said, “Not at all. Have a great interview. Text me when you’re done.”

  “Thanks, I will. See you.”

  “See you. Thanks again, Ms. Pennepacker.”

  Spence took the seat across from the Harvard interviewer, which was probably still warm from my squirming over the past hour. I pulled my winter stuff back on and slunk out of the café.

  Well, it figured that he would get an interview, too, right? And it’s not like we were in competition. Well, we sort of were. But not exactly. Not like I was with all the girls at St. Joan’s. We wouldn’t necessarily be in the same quota. Spence would be in closer competition with Jason—Jason! I couldn’t believe he got one—than he would with me. But still. Not so many spots in the freshman class at Harvard. Not so many at all.

  I trudged back to the Coop, which was really just a big bookstore that also sold sweatshirts and bears and things and had a coffee place where I planned to wait. The sky had started to spit dry, feathery snow, and I squinted against it, white flecks collecting on my eyelashes.

  When I got to the bookstore, I roamed the fiction section. My fingers walked the spines of the books on the remainder table, caressing them the way a hungry person might touch ripe apples. Not that I had time to read for fun. I sighed. Between my APs and the battle for valedictorian, I didn’t think I’d be able to read something fun until the summer. I wondered if Fabiana had slipped up in any of her classes. Just a little. An A-minus, maybe. Something that would nudge her down by that crucial tenth. She was already in at Vassar anyway, and it was her top choice. Couldn’t she just let things slide? Couldn’t she just let me have it?

  My fingers lit upon a spine with a familiar title.

  The Crucible. That damn play was stalking me.

  Okay, I’d read it, but that was weeks ago. And now I had that extra-credit assignment hanging over my head. How the hell was I going to find time to do a huge research paper in between all my other work? Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to it. But then, there was that 65.

  At the thought of the 65, I felt sick. Like, almost ready to throw up in the bookstore sick. Of course I was going to do the extra credit. I should be grateful Ms. Slater even offered it to me. I might as well just buy this remaindered copy—it was way cheap—and reread it while I waited for Spence. Then I wouldn’t spend the entire time worrying that his interview was going better than mine.

  I made my way to the register, feeling cold and conspicuous.

  The guy behind the counter took my book and asked for my Coop number.

  “I don’t have one,” I said.

  “Want to open an account?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I was checking my phone to see if Spence had texted yet. He hadn’t. What if his interview went longer than mine? What would that mean?

  “Good choice,” the counter guy said as he slid the paperback into a bag.

  “Oh. Yeah. I’ve read it.”

  “If you’re interested in this stuff, you should check out an event we’re having in a couple weeks.”

  He gestured to a poster a little ways off from the register, half hidden behind a display of toy mice wearing plastic galoshes. The mice were kind of cute. I found myself wishing I could have one.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. She’s an authority on that stuff. You should come.”

  It was the talk I’d noticed in the front window. Some professor from Northeastern.

  Constance Goodwin. English Cunning Folk Tradition in a North American Idiom: A Cultural Studies Approach. I’d never heard of her. Her book looked really boring anyway.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” I said, fully intending to forget about this conversation the moment it was over. I pulled my phone out again and saw that Spence had texted in the time I’d spent talking to the guy.

  There in 10. Whew!

  My nausea receded, and a smile pulled at my cheek.

  Cool

  Jerk, I thought as I slid the phone back into my pocket. He’s totally going to rock his interview and I’ll be screwed.

  I spotted myself in the mirror on either side of the beverage cooler in the café. My cheeks looked drawn and tired. Dotted with freckles.

  Come on, I said to my reflection. Maybe he screwed it all up. You don’t know. I paused, waiting for an answer. You’re right, I replied to myself. You don’t know.

  Now to find a place to sit and try to look all casual while I waited for him.

  I settled on a table in the corner, a little ways away from the television, with what I hoped was particularly flattering light. I took my hat off and settled my curls back down and arranged myself in such a way that I hoped looked completely at ease and mysterious. I slicked on a fresh coat of lip gloss.

  I flipped open the play and was thumbing through it when I heard a voice say, “Hey.”

  Spence slid into the seat across from me.

  His cheeks were flushed from the cold, and his nose was wet underneath. When he took his hat off, his hair stood up in a mess, and I grinned. He was wearing a sport coat under his parka, with a tie that was also patterned with little ducks. What’s with Andover boys and ducks?

  “Here,” I said, offering him a paper napkin.

  He took it, abashed. “Thanks,” he said, and blew his nose into it. Then he rolled his head back and exhaled at the ceiling. He hadn’t taken off his coat.

  “Well, that sucked ass,” he said.

  I felt simultaneous twinges of relief and dismay, followed immediately by a nice splash of guilt. It’s not like I wanted him to do badly. I liked him. And if we both were . . . But I was being ridiculous. I mean, I hardly knew him. />
  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know! It’s like all she wanted was to talk about stuff I hadn’t done, and not stuff I had. Like, why did I quit lacrosse, or why was I only associate editor of the paper, and not editor. Jesus. Was she like that with you?”

  “Kind of. I guess? I don’t know. I thought she was pretty nice.”

  “Well, you’re lucky,” he said, but without malice. “It could be that she’d already made up her mind. I’m a legacy, but I don’t have grades like yours.”

  I blinked. How did he know what kinds of grades I had? It’s not like we’d ever talked about it.

  “Um,” I started to say.

  He smiled out of one side of his mouth, as though reading the worry on my face. “Anjali told me. Or, I guess she told Jason, and he told me. She’s pretty intimidated by you, you know. In a good way. She was, like, bragging on you.”

  “Anj? Come on.”

  “She was.”

  “Whatever,” I muttered. But my cheeks flushed under his compliment.

  “Anyway. At least it’s over with. I’ve got one more next week, and then it’s just a waiting game. What about you?”

  “This is it for me. A lot of my places don’t really interview.”

  “Yeah. Mine either.”

  He watched me, smiling. I smiled back, and removed my finger from the place it had been holding in the play.

  “You look nice today,” he said.

  My flush deepened until my cheeks felt hot. “Jeez,” I said, because I’m really terrific at taking compliments. “I’m . . . this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. Thanks.”

  “Prep is the new punk. At least in Harvard Square.” He smiled more broadly, I think enjoying how awkward he was making me. But then his eyes shifted to something that was over my left shoulder. His smile slipped.

  “Did she ask you about that?”

  I turned in my chair, following his gaze. A woman in a purple suit filled the television screen. There was a news crawl moving underneath her face.

  “Hey, could you turn this up for a second, please?” I called to the girl behind the counter.

  She shrugged and reached up to the volume on the television.

  “. . . reveal the truth behind the cover-up of what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s. Join us tomorrow morning on This Is Danvers, when we’ll have an exclusive interview with one of the mothers of the sixteen girls who are now afflicted with strange tics, twitching, and mysterious physical symptoms that doctors have, for some reason, been hesitant to explain.”

  The picture dissolved from TJ Wadsworth to still pictures of girls I knew, taken from their Facebook accounts or the St. Joan’s yearbook. Clara, Elizabeth, the Other Jennifer, some others.

  The last face was one I knew all too well.

  Anjali.

  INTERLUDE

  SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

  MAY 30, 1706

  Preternatural!” Reverend Green exclaims.

  I nod.

  “In truth,” I say, “I think Reverend Parris was happy with the diagnosis. He never thought their—” I pause. And correct myself. “Our illness was natural. But he knew an outside opinion would hold more weight. It affirmed what he already thought was true.”

  “But Ann,” the young minister says, urgency in his voice. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell them right then of Abby’s and Betty’s deception?”

  This is the question, isn’t it. I’ve asked myself this question every day, perhaps hundreds of times a day, for a decade and a half. My entire life, all its tribulations and shortcomings, its solitude and shame, can be boiled down to my failure to answer this question.

  I get to my feet and cross the study to the window. I’ve never gotten used to being in this same parsonage. After the Parrises left, I avoided stopping here. Just looking at the parsonage made me sick. I went to meeting only because I knew what kind of talk there’d be if I didn’t.

  I’m looking out now over the very rye field where Abby described watching Sabbaths of an unspeakable nature from the attic window, describing women we’d known from childhood standing with their hands linked, braying at the moon like animals. Now the field is dry and baked by the summer. The sun has dropped lower, reddening the field, red as wine. Red as blood.

  “Ann?” the handsome Reverend prods me.

  I turn to him, struggling to explain.

  “Do you know what it’s like,” I ask him, “to not be listened to?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I can tell from the look on his face that the Reverend is about to insist to me that of course he knows. And he probably thinks he does. But he doesn’t.

  Look at him. He’s a son, maybe even an eldest son, I don’t know. He’s educated. His clothes fit. He’s got that hearty wife in the hall, with the piglet girl and the hiccoughing baby. A whole churchful of parishioners ready to attend to his opinions, looking to him for guidance. Even me. I’m appealing to him, I’m prostrating myself, showing him my sin, as if it’s in his power to absolve me, which it isn’t. He’s been listened to all his life. He always will be.

  “I was an eldest daughter,” I begin, hunting for a way to make him understand. “We were people of worth in the village. I wasn’t bound out, like Abby. My labors weren’t half as hard as hers. But even so, to be a girl of thirteen . . .”

  I hunt in his eyes for understanding, and I can see him straining to find it. Silently, I beg him to see me.

  But I read it on his face plain as day.

  He doesn’t. He can’t.

  I bring my hands to my face to hide my shame.

  A minute wears by while I wait for Reverend Green to cross the room to comfort me, to put his arms around me and draw me to his chest and tell me it’s all right, what’s past is past, that Jesus stands ready to fill my soul with cleansing light and welcome me into the Kingdom of Heaven, where I can lay down my weary burdens and rest.

  But he only says, “Tell me, Ann. Tell me what happened next.”

  My arm hurts where the doctor is gripping it. The men cluster and talk amongst themselves, and after the doctor releases my arm, male face after male face, of varying degrees of whisker, thrusts forward to examine the marks on my flesh, to touch and inspect.

  “An evil hand!” they repeat one after the other, gathering ranks around Reverend Parris.

  “I knew it,” he’s saying to them. “Thomas, didn’t I tell you there was some evil brought among us? Why else would this distemper fall upon my own flesh and blood? It’s been in the making these many months. You’ve all seen it.”

  Abby, meanwhile, has collapsed, worn out from the excitement of her visions. A young minister, Mr. Hale from Beverly, dabs at her brow with a cloth. Betty Parris lies tucked in next to Abby, her eyes open wide and unblinking as though painted on her face.

  “Come,” Reverend Parris says. “The children must rest.”

  “But . . . the window?” a man asks.

  The Reverend frowns down at the two girls on the bolster.

  “They’ll be all right. Reverend Hale can stay. He can pray over them.”

  The younger man starts to object, but catches a fast look from Reverend Parris.

  “Come, let’s go down.” Reverend Parris ushers the worthy gentlemen of Salem down the stairs. “You too, Ann. I don’t want you upsetting them any more.”

  I flush under the implied rebuke, but don’t object. When I regain the ground floor, I find the men folded into the close crowd of women in the parsonage’s hall as husbands tell their wives the doctor’s verdict.

  “Well, I said so right along,” one woman insists. “I raised ten children, and ain’t none of them ever carried on so. Ain’t natural.”

  “An evil hand!” whispers another, who draws away from
me when I pass near her. “But what evil hand?”

  Someone else whispers, “And whose? How’ll the malefactor be discovered?”

  I elbow my way through the crowd to the corner where Betty Hubbard waits for me, her brows arched in inquiry.

  “Annie,” she whispers. “What’s happened? What did the doctor say? Did they catch Abby out?”

  I look at her, and shake my head once.

  Betty Hubbard claps her hands together in glee.

  “Ha!” she trills. “She’s a clever one. Bad, but clever. How’d she fix it?”

  I’m ashamed to tell Betty Hubbard that it is I who have fixed it.

  “Ah,” I demur. “The doctor’s said he can’t find a natural cause for our illness. He’s said we’re under an evil hand.”

  “Our?” Betty Hubbard repeats. “What do you mean, our?”

  I’m on the point of rolling up my sleeve to show the bite when I’m stayed by a woman’s voice announcing, “I know what’s to be done.”

  I recognize the speaker as Goody Sibley. She’s got an unpleasant, meddlesome way about her, with puckers around her lips. She’s exactly the sort of woman you’d expect to find waiting in the hall of a house where something interesting is happening.

  “What’s that?” an unseen voice asks.

  “Prayer,” someone mutters in response. “Prayer shall be our only salvation.”

  “Yes, prayer, of course. But there’s a method we can use. Some simple physick, I’ve seen it done many times. John?” she addresses herself to Tittibe’s Indian husband, who steps forward out of the shadow in the corner where he’d been lingering. Goody Sibley gestures with an impatient flick of her wrist for the slave to come to heel. He does so, but warily.

  “Now then,” Goody Sibley says, and I wonder where she got so much authority, talking of physick like this. She’s no cunning woman, that much I know. There is one, I’ve heard, but I don’t know her. She lives in squalor at the outskirts of the village. Goody Dane, she is. Someone that low wouldn’t mix with worthy folk such as we are. Or are supposed to be.