Conversion

by Katherine Howe

  I stared at her with horror. “You think I’m hysterical. You actually think I have hysteria. What is this, 1896?”

  “No, Colleen,” Ms. Slater said, leaning an elbow on the lectern and her cheek on her fist. “I think you guys are all just really, really stressed out. And I think the school has done a terrible job of helping you. That’s all. I think as soon as we can get rid of these reporters and this Bethany Witherspoon person, and once everybody gets their college choices squared away, and spring finally comes and you realize that high school is about to be behind you forever, and only getting further away the longer you live, this will all become a weird, distant memory. Then one day, it will be a funny anecdote. And then eventually, it’ll feel like it happened to someone else. Someone you used to know.”

  I rested my head in my hands. I trusted her. I trusted Ms. Slater more than the Public Health woman. Maybe they knew better. I wavered, torn between what they were telling me and what I was telling myself.

  I rose to my feet, bringing my bag to my shoulder.

  “All right,” I said, doing my best to make my face look resigned.

  She watched me, to see if it was sinking in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have trusted you more. Pulled you aside at the beginning and told you my doubts about Clara. But they’re quick to fire people around here, as you’ve probably noticed. And I’m totally new here. I need to pay my rent like everyone else.”

  I realized I was disappointed in Ms. Slater. I wanted her to be better than that.

  “It’s okay. I understand,” I said. “I would’ve done the same thing, probably. But there’s one thing I’d really like someone to explain to me.”

  “Anything,” Ms. Slater said.

  I gave her my steeliest stare.

  “How is hysteria making Anjali vomit actual pins?”

  Ms. Slater’s mouth opened to object, but no words came out. I frowned at her, but I didn’t wait for a response. While I was talking, my phone had vibrated with an incoming text. Spence was waiting.

  “You know, it’s pretty weird to go to boarding school only a forty-minute drive from your parents’ house,” I remarked as I slid in next to him.

  “Colleen!” he breathed, pulling me to his chest, his fingers in my curls, and knocking me into the steering wheel as he did so. “I was worried.”

  “Ow,” I muttered into his shirt.

  “What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened?” Spence pulled away just far enough to look into my eyes and smooth a curl off my forehead, touching my face with his fingertips as though to make sure I were really there, and safe.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  His fingertips brushed down my cheek, lingering at the corner of my mouth, and his eyes searched into mine for a long minute. I swallowed.

  “Colleen,” he started to say, but before he could get anything else out, I took his face in my own hands and pulled his mouth to mine.

  He resisted for a second—surprised, I guess—but then his resistance fell away and he kissed back, hungrily. He moved a hand to the small of my back and the other threaded into my hair. He leaned into me, pulling me to him, my knee knocking into the gearshift, and my hands moved to his waist, fumbling under his shirt until they found his skin.

  He tasted perfect.

  Salty and sweet and male and perfect.

  It took real effort on my part to remember that we were sitting in an illegally parked car in my high school parking lot, the self-same parking lot that had been taken over by dueling protesters and a good percentage of the national news media. Shouts from a protester erupted from the steps of the school, and a guy with a camera on his shoulder jogged past the car, followed by a reporter in an overcoat. I broke away from Spence, smiling. I wiped my lips with the back of my wrist.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” I said.

  Spence looked short of breath, and his eyes were blinking rapidly. “I had to skip basketball. What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “Okay.” He fumbled to start the car, collecting himself. “Where are we going?”

  “Anjali’s house.”

  “Anjali’s house,” he repeated. “I’m AWOL, just so you know. If I’m not back for check-in at ten, I’m getting written up.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m serious. Two more write-ups and I get suspended.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Anjali lived in a sprawling mansion in Pride’s Crossing, which looked kind of out of place in New England because it was made of stucco and had these Spanish tiles on the roof and, like, a five-car garage. I always forgot how to get there, and had to use the GPS on my phone. We spent fifteen minutes lost in downtown Beverly before I finally got everything squared away and pointed us in the right direction.

  While that was happening, Spence tried to come up with a gentle way to tell me that he thought I was losing my mind.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he insisted, turning down a side street for the second time that carried us past a graveyard full of leaning death’s head tombstones. I looked away. Sometimes, I’m superstitious.

  “You don’t,” I countered. “I can tell.”

  “Colleen. Listen. I do. Okay? It’s just . . . I don’t know. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s even possible for a second, why would Emma do that? I thought she got along great with everybody.”

  “Maybe she can’t help it,” I said, peering at my GPS. “Turn left.”

  “Here? Wait, here?”

  “No, we missed it.”

  Spence rolled his eyes and did a quick illegal U-turn.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s no physical way anyone would be able to hurt people that way. Right? And she wouldn’t have any reason to do it. So doesn’t it make more sense, what the Public Health Department lady said?”

  I flung my phone into my lap and stared hard at him.

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Do you? Just say it.”

  “But—”

  “Because if you don’t believe me, I’ll just get out of the car and you can go back and not get written up. Okay? That’s fine with me.” I put my hand on the door handle to show him I was serious.

  Spence glanced at me, worried. “Come on, Colleen,” he said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “It’s just, I don’t see how that would work. You know?”

  “What. Emma?”

  “Yes, Emma.”

  I gazed out the window as Beverly’s modest downtown slowly morphed into stately residences, most hidden behind hedges, with gates and keypads and combinations. Stables in the back. Broad, lush lawns, tipped with frost. Lights winking on ahead of the advancing dusk. Pride’s Crossing wasn’t much like our neighborhood in Danvers, that was for sure.

  I caught sight of my own reflection in the passenger-side window, and was startled by how much older I looked. My cheeks had lost their roundness, leaving hollows under the cheekbones. I turned my face away to hide from myself.

  “I don’t know either. I don’t blame you for thinking it sounds crazy. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that hysteria is all in our heads. And hysteria doesn’t explain Anjali barfing up actual pins. Does it?”

  I stared at him hard in the dark, watching his profile for signs of agreement. Instead, he kept his face carefully neutral. Spence tossed the flop of hair off his forehead and cast a quick look at me before turning his attention back to the road. Instead of answering, he said, “What’s her house number again? Sixteen forty-five?” and put on his turn signal.

  We crept up Anjali’s driveway, this long gravel road that crunched on for a quarter of a mile. She once told me her dad had to pay someone to rake it.
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  All the windows in the house glowed orange, like a jack-o’-lantern, and I recognized Anjali’s mom’s Mercedes parked outside.

  My breath puffed from my mouth like smoke when I stepped out of Spence’s car.

  “Should I wait?” he asked. “I’ve only met her, like, twice.” The light from Anjali’s windows threw his face half into shadow.

  “You’re friends with Jason. She probably knows more about you than I do.”

  A smile flashed across his face, deepening the dimple in his cheek. As he joined me under the front door light, waiting for someone to answer the bell, he whispered, “I frankly doubt that.”

  Inside we heard laughter and footsteps, and then Anjali’s mom opened the door.

  “Colleen!” she exclaimed in her gorgeous British accent, sweeping me up in a hug. “My goodness! Come in, come in. But I wish I’d known you were coming, I’d have made more poori. Who’s this?” She looked Spence up and down with a polite smile.

  “Hello, Dr. Gupta, I’m Spencer,” Spence said, sticking his hand out like I imagined he’d been doing since he was four years old and dressed in a miniature navy sport coat with brass buttons. “I go to school with Jason.”

  “Ah! Spencer, yes. Anjali mentioned you,” Dr. Gupta said, clasping and releasing his hand with a sidelong look at me under her eyelashes. “Everyone’s in the kitchen. Come.”

  We trailed after her down a long marble hallway, into a kitchen warm and bright with cooking. At the sound of our approach, a guy sitting at the granite breakfast bar turned to look over his shoulder and grinned. Speak of the Devil, and I’ll find Jason Rothstein at the breakfast bar with pani poori all over his chin.

  “Dude!” he said, getting up and clapping Spence on the back in a bro-hug. “Wassup?”

  “Colleen!” Anjali squealed, hug-ambushing me from behind.

  “Hey, Anj,” I said. Everyone seemed so normal. Except for Anjali’s raspy voice and the scabs around the corners of her mouth, I’d never know anything was amiss.

  “Can you stay for dinner? We totally have enough. We do, don’t we, Mom?”

  “I’ll see,” said Dr. Gupta. She sounded doubtful.

  “Um,” I demurred. “Yeah. That would be great. But Anj, listen. I have to talk to you.”

  She could see on my face that something was amiss.

  “Sure,” she said, eyebrows rising in concern. “Come on, let’s go in here.”

  The boys settled at the breakfast bar, bantering about being AWOL from their dorm and whose ass was going to get kicked which way from Sunday, while Anjali led me by the hand into the family room off the kitchen. The lights were off in there. Anjali had one of those houses where they routinely forgot to go in certain rooms for weeks at a time. The family room felt like that. All overstuffed chintz armchairs that no one sat in.

  “Anj,” I whispered to her.

  “What is it, Colleen? God, you look half dead. Have you been sleeping?” Anjali’s voice drifted to me through the dimness of the family room. I saw her shape moving in the shadows.

  “Look, you’re going to think I’m crazy for asking. But the first time your thing happened. With the pins. Were you with Emma?”

  “Emma?” she asked, the contours of her face forming a frown in the dark. “Um, maybe. Yes, actually. I’d just been having coffee with her, now that you mention it. I got home, and it happened like ten minutes later. Why?”

  My fingers dug into the deep upholstery of a chintz armchair. “I was at her house today,” I whispered. “She was really, really upset.”

  “About Tad,” Anjali said, nodding sagely and drifting by the bookcase at the far side of the room. She was pacing—slowly, but pacing. “Yeah, I know.”

  “You knew?”

  “God, Colleen. I thought everyone knew.”

  “I didn’t!” I exclaimed, equally stunned and hurt that Emma would have kept something so huge from me. We were best friends, after all. Nominally. I mean, I guessed I could see why Emma would want to talk boys with Anjali instead of me. Anjali had one, to begin with. He was right there in the kitchen, AWOL from his dorm, joking around with her mom. But now I sort of did, too. Didn’t I? Mine was in the kitchen, too.

  “Yeah, well.” Anjali shrugged, not looking at me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. You’ve been working really hard. We understand.” She said these words easily enough that I could tell she was saying what she was supposed to say. Not the truth. I couldn’t see her at all where she stood in the shadow by the bookcase. Anjali’s voice whispered to me from nowhere. I doubled over, my hands on my knees, her words forcing the air out of me as surely as if she’d punched me in the stomach.

  “But I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  My closest friend couldn’t confide in me about the most devastating thing that had ever happened to her. I’d been too wrapped up in myself to see her pain.

  “It’s pretty intense stuff,” Anjali remarked. She stepped back out of the shadows so that I could see the outline of her hair against the kitchen light. “I mean, they had their whole thing, right, which is crazy enough, because, you know, she’s basically never had a boyfriend before. Much less one who was a teacher. Then her mom found out, and he up and quit without telling her, and now he won’t see her. She’s wrecked.”

  “God. Poor Emma.” I felt ill.

  “And then you’ve got college apps on top of everything. He was supposed to be writing her recs, and she says he won’t do it now. Says it wouldn’t be right.” She snorted on this last word with derision. “You know he’s probably why she didn’t get a Harvard interview, right? He went there and everything.”

  “What a dick.” A rush of protective vengeance flooded me, and I trembled, wanting to run to Emma and shield her. But just as quickly, my protectiveness subsided into shame. I hadn’t been there for her. Where had I been?

  “Yeah,” said Anjali, crossing her arms over her chest.

  We stared at each other for a long minute in the dark, the kitchen light falling between us. It was warm and friendly in there, full of food and boys and everything good in life. What were we doing here, sitting in the dark?

  “Anj,” I said. “While I was with her today, something weird happened.”

  “Like, what weird?”

  “She was crying. Bawling. End-of-the-world crying. I don’t remember ever having seen her so upset.”

  “Okay.”

  “And when she looked up at me . . .” I struggled to find a way to explain the sensation that I’d felt when Emma looked at me. That digging corkscrew pain. Her eyes going red.

  “What?” Anjali prodded me.

  “It was like . . . there was this spike of pain, in my forehead. Like, imagine the worst pain you’ve ever experienced, and then make it one level worse. It felt almost like it came from outside me. Like a spike being driven into my brain. It was so intense, I, like, fainted or something, and when I came to, I was talking backward.”

  “Are you serious?” Anjali stepped nearer to me, dropping her voice to a dead whisper. “Backward?”

  “Backward. Totally.”

  “Do you think you’ve got the Mystery Illness?”

  My eyes shifted left and right, mindful of how insane I’d sound if anyone overheard me. “Yes,” I whispered. “And more than that, I think Emma’s somehow responsible.”

  “Oh, come on!” Anjali’s voice rose, and I shushed her.

  “I don’t know how else to explain it,” I hissed. “Everyone who’s gotten sick got sick right after coming into contact with her. Right? Clara in advisory. The Other Jennifer in bio lab. Elizabeth at field hockey. Those girls at the assembly. You.”

  “It’s a coincidence. What you’re talking about, it’s not even possible.” Anjali brought her face close to mine, and her eyes bored into me, as if she were t
rying to read my mind.

  “Anjali, I felt it happening.” I reached out and grasped her arm, desperate for her to believe me. “She was so upset, she almost didn’t know I was there. It was like this feeling was coming out of her. It went into me. I couldn’t stop it. All I could do was run away. And after I ran away, I started feeling better. Like, immediately.”

  “You ran away?” Her face contorted in dismay. “She’s lying there upset after going through some of the worst crap of her entire life, and you just ran away? What’s the matter with you, Colleen? You never used to be like this.”

  My hand fell from her arm and I stared at Anjali, shocked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, I know you’re all gung ho about valedictorian and everything, and I think we’ve all been pretty cool about it, but you need to seriously reevaluate your priorities. Emma’s your friend. She’s really, really upset. Tad has completely messed with her head, and maybe even ruined her life. And now you’re trying to blame the whole school getting sick on her? Seriously, what’s the matter with you?”

  “That’s not what I—” I took an involuntary step back, reeling from what Anjali was saying.

  “And anyway, my mom talked to the Department of Public Health, like, two days ago. They already know what it is.”

  “I talked to them, too,” I said with rising urgency. “They called it something like conversion disorder. But Anj, that’s, like, a reaction to stress. It doesn’t explain why you’d be barfing up pins!”

  “No,” said Dr. Gupta, silhouetted in the doorway from the kitchen. I started, unsure how long she’d been standing there, or what she’d heard me say. She moved over and put an arm around her daughter. “It doesn’t. But that’s because Anjali doesn’t have conversion disorder. She doesn’t have the Mystery Illness.”

  “What do you mean?” I was baffled.

  Dr. Gupta looked kindly at Anjali, who glanced with worry up into her mother’s eyes.

  “Do you want to tell her?” Dr. Gupta asked. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  Anjali swallowed, and looked levelly at me.

  “I have pica,” she said.

  “Pica?” I repeated, looking between her and her mother. “I don’t know what that is.”