Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  The three of us milled around, craning our necks to read the menu blackboard and drooling over the chocolate chip muffins and brownies and cookies.

  “Oh, I’m so getting one of those,” Deena said, indicating a Rice Krispies treat. When I ordered chamomile tea, Emma let out a sharp laugh.

  “Oh my God. What happened?”

  “What?”

  “Your teeth!” Emma reached a fingertip forward, as though she were going to stick it into my mouth.

  “Oh, this?” I laughed, ducking her finger. “You know. Just trench mouth. Nothing serious.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. Unless I BITE YOU.” I lunged, making like I was going to bite her.

  Emma squealed, fending me off with both hands, and I chased her in a zombie shamble around Deena, who held her coffee high overhead where it would be safe. Emma and I collapsed on each other, laughing, with Emma trying to stick her finger in my mouth and me grasping her wrist and holding her off.

  “You guys!” Deena chastised us as she found a table and started shedding her winter layers.

  “BIIIIIITE YOUUUUU!” I moaned in zombie voice, ’til I noticed something odd on Emma’s hand. I stopped zombieing around and took Emma’s hand more gently.

  “Dude,” I said. “What’s this?”

  She had a growth of some kind on her knuckle. It was pink and tender looking, wettish, and the skin around it was red and irritated.

  “What. Oh, that?”

  Emma reclaimed her hand from my grasp, looked at it briefly, and then thrust it into her pocket.

  “It’s nothing. A wart.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Gee, thanks, Trench Mouth,” Emma said.

  She was joking, but I thought she looked halfway irritated.

  “Bite youuuuuu!” I zombie-moaned again as we all settled around our café table with drinks and sticky baked goods.

  We were getting situated in our chairs and stuffing our scarves into our jacket sleeves when something across the room caught Emma’s eye. As I watched, the remnants of her smile melted off her face like running candle wax.

  “What is it?” I asked, resting a hand on her arm.

  Emma kept staring and didn’t answer.

  Deena and I turned in our seats, following Emma’s gaze.

  On the other side of the café, close to the back door, was a small table under a low-hanging red lamp, with a guy and a girl sitting at it. The girl was a tweedy college type in a blazer and knee-high boots who had a laptop open and wore heavy-framed hipster glasses. The guy she was sitting with was angled partway away from us, about the same age as the girl, maybe early twenties, slim, and had mussed hair and a black T-shirt that had been washed to a perfect, weathered dark gray. He cradled an open book, one hand holding his head up by an ear. For a second I couldn’t figure out why Emma would be bothering to look at them. They were probably just a couple of Salem State students on a study date or something.

  “Oh my God,” Deena said.

  Then I saw it.

  The cute young guy was Mr. Mitchell.

  “Oh, hey!” I said, my eyes brightening. “Wow, that’s crazy. You guys want to go say hi?”

  “Eh,” said Deena. “You go ahead. I didn’t have him, remember?”

  “Come on,” I said to Emma, plucking at her sleeve. “Don’t you want to say hi?”

  Emma looked up at me with wide gray eyes.

  “Sure,” she said. But her voice sounded funny.

  We made our way over, hesitant, and I would have been giggling the way I would if I were about to accost James Franco, except that Emma wasn’t giggling with me. We arrived next to their table and stood there, close together, waiting to be noticed.

  The girl saw us first, looking up with her glasses reflecting the blue-white light of her laptop screen.

  “Tad,” she said.

  Mr. Mitchell looked like he was trying to collapse in on himself, shrinking smaller the closer we drew. But at the sound of the girl’s voice, he glanced up, first at her and then at us.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed.

  I caught a lightning flash of panic zigzag across his face, but he covered it quickly with a professional-seeming smile.

  “Colleen. Emma. Hi.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  Emma didn’t say anything, so I poked her.

  “Hi,” she said, voice flat.

  Mr. Mitchell’s eyes moved between us uneasily, like he couldn’t decide where to look. He swallowed, pulling nervously on his earlobe.

  “So,” he managed to say. “How’s it going?”

  “Good,” I said. “We’re good.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad to hear that.” His eyes settled on Emma with rapid blinks.

  There was a long, deadly pause. I waited for him to introduce Laptop Girl to us, but after a certain expanse of time I realized that wasn’t going to happen, and that in fact maybe he wasn’t all that happy we were there.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked.

  “I’ve been well, thanks for asking, Colleen,” he said, too formally. “How’re college apps going?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I got deferred early decision by Dartmouth and Williams, which totally sucked, but Emma just found out she got into Endicott, so at least she knows she’s all set next year no matter what happens.”

  Mr. Mitchell’s eyes settled on Emma with a shine.

  “Endicott. That’s great.” I’d never heard a guy sound more neutral.

  “Not that we were surprised, I mean, you know how good her grades are,” I continued.

  “Yes.”

  Emma still didn’t say anything. The skin on the back of my neck started to feel warm.

  “Um.” I groped for something else to say. “You should really come back. We’ve got a substitute for AP US, and she’s okay, but she’s, like, a little weird. Like, I think she wants to teach college or something, and that she thinks teaching high school is, like, a waste of time.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yeah, well.” A pause. “Crazy stuff happening at St. Joan’s, huh.”

  “Crazy,” I agreed.

  We all stood around nodding about how crazy it was.

  “Well.” He gave us a tight smile, and a harder tug on his earlobe. “Nice to see you guys.”

  I looked at Emma, who was staring at him. Her eyes had that oyster-shell look that they get sometimes. Hipster Glasses Girl stared at her laptop as if we weren’t there.

  “Okay,” I said, a little uncertain. “Well. Nice to see you.”

  “You too. Good luck with everything.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took Emma’s arm and dragged her back to the other end of the café, eager to pretend like that hadn’t just happened.

  “If anyone needs me, I’ll be under the table,” I muttered. “You can page me when he’s gone.”

  Deena laughed from inside her coffee cup.

  “Oh my God, Deena, that was so weird. Wasn’t he acting so weird?” I said to Emma.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “And he didn’t look like he’d been sick at all. I mean, what the hell?”

  Emma hadn’t looked away from them. Mr. Mitchell and the laptop girl were leaning over their table, having an intense-looking conversation. I caught their eyes sliding over to us, and the conversation grew more animated. The three of us watched their conversation unfold, unable to hear anything, until we realized that we were staring, largely because Hipster Glasses looked directly at us and then all three of us gasped and blushed and stared fiercely at our muffins.

  Never have I been more interested in a muffin.

  Deena was trying to suppress a snicker, and failing.

  “Are they still looking at us?” Emma whispered after a minute of f
orcible, concerted ignoring them.

  I peeked behind a hand, and they seemed to have gone back to their respective projects.

  “I don’t think so.”

  We sighed with relief and began to peel the paper wrapping off our muffins in meditative silence.

  “Maybe he just, like, quit,” Deena ventured after a while.

  “He looks so different without the tie. Doesn’t he look different?”

  “Yeah,” Emma said. She’d gone back to staring.

  “Why do you think he wasn’t excited to see us, Em? I’d think he’d be kind of excited to see us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He wasn’t excited to see you?” Deena asked. “It looked like you talked for long enough.”

  “Kind of. I guess.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “College, mostly.”

  “Not about the Mystery Illness? You’d think he’d want to talk about that.”

  I could hear the words capitalized when Deena said that. That’s what they’d taken to calling it on the news. We’d started calling it that ironically, but at some point over the last week it had stopped being funny.

  “No, not really. Not as such.”

  “PANDAS. That doesn’t sound like much of an illness.” Deena slurped her coffee. “It sounds made up, if you ask me.”

  “Did you ever get called in to talk to Nurse Hocking and Dr. Strayed?” I asked.

  Deena nodded. “Couple days ago. It was weird. Did they ask you all kinds of personal questions?”

  “What kind of personal questions?” Emma asked.

  I was surprised, as she hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to our conversation, so absorbed was she in watching Mr. Mitchell (Tad ) and Glasses Girl at work.

  “Ah,” Deena said. “Sex questions, mostly.”

  Emma’s eyes slid from Mr. Mitchell’s table and settled on her hands, which were folded around her mug of tea. A finger crept over and played with her new wart.

  “Did you tell them about Japan Boy?”

  “Colleen!” Deena smacked me on the arm. “No.”

  Emma smirked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They asked me all kinds of stuff like that. Not just about me either.”

  “About who else?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  “What people?” Emma asked.

  “Clara, actually. Which is weird, ’cause it’s not like I’d know, you know?”

  Emma’s ears flushed scarlet.

  “Did they ask you about strep throat?” Deena asked.

  “Yeah. They seem pretty certain it’s PANDAS,” I said.

  “That’s one stupid-ass name for a disease, if you ask me,” Deena said, popping a morsel of Rice Krispies treat into her mouth. “But I’ll tell you one thing, it made my dad feel a lot better about me still going to school.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “’Cause I had strep when I was little. And that stuff, all that weird twitching and whatnot, starts happening, like, a few months after you have it. And I definitely didn’t have it last year.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Emma said.

  “So why are you out of school, if you can’t get PANDAS?”

  “Well,” Emma demurred, rolling a muffin crumb between her finger and thumb. “You know.”

  “Her mom,” I explained to Deena. She hadn’t grown up with us. She didn’t know Mrs. Blackburn as well. Not that I knew her knew her. We just didn’t ask, when it came to Emma’s mom.

  “What’s your mom’s deal?”

  Emma shrugged.

  “I don’t know. She worries.”

  “Still and all,” I said. “It’s pretty weird. They said on TV that it was really rare. Why do you think so many would have it at St. Joan’s, and no place else? And why would it just be showing up now, and never before?”

  We all stared at the center of our café table, and by we all I mean Deena and me, because Emma was still staring at Mr. Mitchell.

  “Maybe,” Deena said, “there was an outbreak last year. Of, like, a special kind of strep throat. One that’s more likely to cause PANDAS. Maybe it was just at our school. Like a mutation or something? Why isn’t anyone talking about it if there’s a mutation?”

  She was on the point of saying something else when, without warning, Emma got to her feet and started across the café back to Mr. Mitchell’s table.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, waylaying Emma with a hand on her arm.

  “Um,” Emma said, frowning down at me. “I forgot. He offered to write me a rec letter. For college? I have to ask him about it.”

  “A rec letter?” I echoed, confused.

  “Yeah.” Emma shook herself free of my hand and gave me a forced smile. “It’ll just take a second.”

  Deena and I watched as Emma marched across the café, coming to a stop by Mr. Mitchell’s table. Emma talked, him trying to get a word in edgewise, while Glasses Girl glared at her. Then Mr. Mitchell got up, frowning, and he and Emma hurried through the back screen door of the café. They stood in the alley just outside, their shadows long in the streetlight. I couldn’t see them very well, but Emma definitely had her arms crossed, and then Mr. Mitchell’s shadow moved over her body and we couldn’t see her.

  “Did you know his first name is Tad?” I remarked to Deena.

  “Huh. I didn’t know that. I didn’t have him, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  We both stared at the screen door. Emma’s silhouette reappeared, close to his ear.

  “Tad,” I repeated. “Taaaaaaaaaad.”

  The name made me think of tadpoles. Tad bits. Small things.

  “What’s that short for, anyway? Theodore?” Deena wondered.

  “No idea.”

  Another pause, almost unbearably long.

  “Maybe he just didn’t like teaching, you know?” Deena tried again. “Maybe he just got sick of high school.”

  “I wouldn’t blame him. I’m sick of high school.”

  Deena turned back and looked at me with surprise. “You are?”

  “Definitely. I hate it.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever said that aloud to anyone, but it was true. I hated obsessing about my grades. Hated keeping a weather eye on Fabiana all the time. Hated having my parents track my every move, like they didn’t trust me, even though I’d never done anything really wrong. Hated Wheez and Michael always stealing my stuff, having no respect for my space. Hated not having a car, so my dad had to drop me off at school every day and I had to get a ride home from Deena, never getting to decide where I wanted to go and when. I hated wearing a uniform, God. So dehumanizing. Hated worrying if my zits would come back, hated being so tall that I stuck out in a hallway full of nothing but girls. Hated my ugly freckles. Hated my perennially snarled curly hair.

  And I hated how most of us had grown up together, so that we never had a chance to really change. We could try, but people just kept seeing an earlier version of us. We each had our own narrative, our own character we were required to perform in the daily play that was “St. Joan’s Academy for Girls,” the best school in Danvers, the proving ground for the rich and the smart. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty tired of being in that play. I wanted to appear in something new.

  I was on the point of trying to explain this to Deena when the front door of the café squeaked open and a girl came in. She was in ripped black jeans and combat boots and super-heavy goth makeup, and she had pink hair.

  And the reason she had pink hair was because she was Jennifer Crawford. Of course. I mean, I basically never saw her outside of school, where I was used to seeing her in a plaid skirt just like mine. She looked completely different. She looked confident. She looked badass, actually.

  She didn’t
seem to be looking for anyone, but when she spotted Deena and me, she grinned anyway.

  “Hi, guys!” Jennifer Crawford said, plopping down in our fourth chair. “What’s up?”

  “Not much. Just hanging out.”

  “Where’s Emma?” Jennifer Crawford knew we tended to move in a pack.

  “Outside, asking Mr. Mitchell about a rec letter he owes her for someplace.”

  “Mr. Mitchell?” Her face brightened under its layers of eye makeup. “That’s wild. Does that mean he’s not sick anymore? Maybe he’ll be back next week. D’you talk to him?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Colleen said he was acting weird.”

  “Huh,” Jennifer Crawford said, sliding Emma’s muffin on its flowered-open paper wrapper nearer to her and picking a corner off of it. “Did he say when he was coming back? I’m getting really sick of that Ms. Slater. She’s a bitch.”

  “Um.” I glanced back to the rear screen door. Mr. Mitchell’s and Emma’s shadows moved over the screen, joining together and breaking apart, making their hands and arms look grotesque. Worry bloomed in my stomach. “No. I guess he didn’t.”

  Jennifer Crawford chewed Emma’s muffin and followed my gaze.

  “Weird,” she said. “He say why he left?”

  The shadows of Emma and Tad blended together into one shape, and in that moment I saw with perfect clarity why he had left. God, I was such an idiot. How could I not have seen it? I gripped the seat of my chair and stared at the screen door, swallowing my panic.

  “No,” I said, trying to keep my face neutral. “He didn’t say.”

  “Hmm,” Jennifer Crawford mused. She peeled most of the muffin top off and said in an aside to Deena, “I just eat the tops. They’re really the best part, don’t you think?”

  Deena smiled. “Definitely.”

  “So, I just heard something crazy,” Jennifer Crawford continued, apparently finished with the question of our missing history teacher and licking muffin scum from a thumb.

  “What’s that?” Deena asked.

  I pushed my own muffin away. What were they doing outside? Were they fighting? Or were they . . . ? It was disgusting. It was even worse than thinking about Jason Rothstein with his hand on the back of Anjali’s neck. He was an adult! I mean, he wasn’t old like Father Molloy, but God. He was out of college. He was . . . I felt dizzy. I didn’t want Deena to see what I was thinking. I dug my nails into my thighs, hard.