Conversion (12 page)

“Um,” I said. I was saying a lot of
um
in this interview. “A couple of them, I’m pretty sure. Yes.”

“What about Clara Rutherford?”

“Clara?” I echoed.

It wasn’t like Clara and I were close enough friends for me to know. I peered at Nurse Hocking. Of course, she might not know if we were close enough friends or not. From the outside, it probably looked like Clara and I were part of the same essential group. Adults sometimes missed subtle gradations of social distinction like that.

“Do you know if Clara is sexually active?” The gravelly suit woman restated the question as if I somehow hadn’t understood.

“Well, I’m not . . . Why are you talking to me first, anyway?” I asked, a twist of suspicion tying itself in my throat.

The nurse and the suit woman exchanged a look.

“You were the first one to bring it to our attention,” Nurse Hocking said. “You’re kind of ground zero for this whole—” She paused, waving her hand in a circle, looking for the right euphemism. She finally decided on “situation” after the suit woman supplied it for her.

“So?”

“So . . .” She drew the words out. “We’re trying to reconstruct everything that happened around when Clara and the other girls fell ill. Just so we can be sure it’s contained.”

“Why wouldn’t it be contained?” I asked.

“Oh, it is,” the nurse hastened to add.

“We’re almost finished,” the suit woman said, as if that would make it okay.

“Just one more question, Colleen,” Nurse Hocking said, shuffling through the papers in my file. “How many times have you had strep throat?”

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706

G
rinning at you?” Reverend Green asks, his fine brows knitting over his eyes.

“Grinning,” I affirm. “Like a dog with a pullet in its mouth.”

“But you said she was screaming bloody murder when you arrived at the parsonage.”

“So I did.”

The Reverend leans back in his chair, a fingertip alongside his temple. “And that Mrs. Parris said she’d been so for some days.”

“Yes.” I watch him, wondering if he understands.

“I see,” he says at length. “Go on.”

I’m standing in the parsonage loft, and downstairs I hear Reverend Parris telling his wife that he’ll be calling in some worthy gentlemen for their opinions. He lists several names, all men I know, all of them active in the village church. Among the names I hear mentioned, foremost among them is my father’s.

An inquiry from Mrs. Parris, the exact nature of which is muffled.

“Tomorrow, if I can,” I hear Reverend Parris say in response.

I hear bustling, Tittibe busying herself with midday dinner. Susannah’s stopped crying, and Thomas is asking his father a question that I can’t hear.

Tomorrow, Abby’s bound to be found out.

“Abby, what’s all this? What are you about?” I whisper, not wanting the adults to hear me.

She grins wider. Shrugs.

“You can hear them well as me,” I say. “Tomorrow the Reverend’s bringing some magistrates in, and they’re going to look you well over. They’ll find you’re not sick. You’ll be in the pillory. And I won’t be sorry to see it.”

“I won’t,” she says.

“They’ll throw clods at you, and cabbages, and they’ll be frozen. You just think about that. A frozen cabbage hitting your face.”

She leans back on the bolster and toys with a length of her hair. She looks clean and combed, and her cheeks are pink with rest. It’s snug up in the loft, with the warmth from the downstairs fire and the smells of dinner, tasty things roasting, rich in the steam collected under the roof. The feeling has finally come back to my feet from my long trudge in the snow. I’d like to climb into that trundle myself.

“Look you, Annie,” she says. “If Betty’s too sick to fetch and carry, why can’t I be, too? Perhaps she’s given me her vile distemper. Anyway, I’m much tireder than she is all the time. Why should I be a servant and she not be? She’s no better than me. I deserve some rest.”

Betty Parris is watching us, her eyes as wide as plates. I glance at her for confirmation. She shakes her head quickly but says nothing.

“It’s a lie, Abby,” I say, my hands knotting under my apron. “It’s a vile sin, lying. If they’re working you too hard, it’s up to you to ask God for His mercy. You can’t just take it for yourself.”

She sticks out her lower lip in a wicked pout.

“But I am sick!” she whines. “The Reverend says so. I’m being tortured. I’m near torn to pieces. Look!”

She sticks out one skinny arm and pulls the sleeve of her shift up above her elbow. The skin is mottled red, scored with evil-looking marks.

“Why, Abby!” I cry, horrified. It’s like the pox, only worse.

I hurry to her, flushed with shame at my suspicions. She smiles in triumph. I perch on the edge of her bed, taking the arm in my hands and turning it nearer the light.

“See?” she says. “Did you ever see such distemper? I need my rest. Everything they do for me only makes it worse. Mrs. Parris and that island witch are at their wits’ end to find a cure.”

“And what’ve they tried?” I ask, frowning over the marks.

Upon closer inspection they don’t look like pox at all. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the like. Except, possibly . . . I hunt back in my mind for the time my brother met a rat in the hayloft, and ran in sobbing, his hands covered in bites.

“Oh, most everything. Poultices of all kinds, a plaster, warm beveridge with sage leaves, purgatives, and lots of rest, of course. I need my sleep.” She says this last bit primly, her eyelashes lowered.

I brush a fingertip over the marks. Abby flinches. They’re red enough that they could be growing foul with pus, but not quite. They sure do smart, though, from the look of them.

“And there’s no improvement?” I ask.

“None. I just cry and cry and scream and scream.” She pauses. “And Thomas has to carry in the buckets for me.”

I glance into her eyes, which are gleaming with mischief. She regains her arm from my grasp and pulls the sleeve back down.

“Abby,” I start to say.

“It’s easy,” she says. “You want me to show you?”

“Show me?” I echo.

She nods, a strange smile on her face.

“Roll up your sleeve,” she commands me.

I shrug off my cloak and push the sleeve up as far as it will go on the tight jacket I’m wearing, exposing a few inches above my wrist. Abby takes my arm in her hands. Her touch is gentle as she probes my skin with her fingertips. She glances at me, her smile growing wider.

Then she pulls my wrist to her mouth and sinks her teeth into my flesh.

I scream, yanking my arm away, and stare at her with horror.

She’s laughing, wiping her mouth with the back of a wrist.

“Abby!” I cry, cradling my arm in my lap. A semicircle of marks on my skin flushes crimson, some of them deep enough that droplets of blood are pushing to the surface.

A commotion stirs downstairs as the Parrises wonder which of us cried out.
Was it Betty? It didn’t sound like Betty. And that wasn’t Abby’s scream. Could it be Ann? What if it’s Ann?

At the foot of the ladder Reverend Parris calls up, “Ann? Are you all right?”

Abby has her arms wrapped around her waist, and she’s laughing silently.

“See?” she whispers. “Easy.”

I’ve gotten to my feet, staring down at her with equal parts wonder and horror.

“Ann? Answer me! I’m coming up.”

“No!” I find my voice, though it’s shaking. “I’m quite well. Thank you, Reverend Parris.”

“Who was it cried out just now?”

Abby watches me, waiting to see what I’ll say. Betty’s watching, too, the blankets brought up before her mouth.

“Ah,” I demur. I could say it was Abby. But then she’ll have me in a lie. “It was me, Reverend Parris. I cried out. But I’m all right.”

Abby has settled back in her bedclothes, arms behind her, cradling her head, sleepy and smiling.

“You’ll see,” she whispers. “It pays to have a good distemper now and again.”

“Ann, I want you to come down this instant. The girls need their rest, and we’ve got a message for you to take to your father. Come down!”

The ladder rattles with their insistence.

I gather my cloak up to my chest and back away from Abby. Each foot goes down unsteadily, as though a fearsome pit were widening around me.

“Coming,” I call, my voice shaking.

“Always have to come when called,” Abby whispers. “Fetch and carry, obey everyone. You’ll see, Annie. Don’t we deserve some sport?”

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012

T
he school nurse and the mystery suit woman interrogated me for seemingly ever. All sorts of questions about strep throat—have I had it? How many times? Did it ever turn into scarlet fever? What about rheumatic fever? I said I didn’t really remember, but wouldn’t all that stuff be in my file anyway? They said yes, but they wanted to be sure the file was accurate. Would I please ask my parents? And on and on. The whole time I kept staring at the floor plan spread behind the nurse’s desk.

The one with seven pins on it.

By the time I was free, the class period had already changed over and I was due in AP US History. Almost overdue—class was all of ten minutes from being over. At that rate, they’d never talk to everyone in the senior class. Or if they did, they wouldn’t finish until we were all in college.

When I skulked into the classroom, Ms. Slater was wrapping up a long lecture about early colonial architecture. She had an overhead projector and was drawing on a transparency of a house floor plan, with lots of little arrows and things. She saw me come in and nodded at me to sit. Emma must have told her where I was.

Emma pulled her coat off the seat she’d been saving for me and whispered, “You were gone for forever. What did they ask you?”

“Weird stuff,” I whispered back. “Like about what vaccines I’d had, and if I’d ever had strep throat, and if I was having sex with anybody.”

Emma blanched. “Oh my God. That sounds awful.”

“Yeah. But that wasn’t the weirdest part.” I shifted my eyes left and right to make sure no one else would be able to overhear me. Emma leaned closer.

“It’s not five,” I whispered.

“What do you mean, it’s not five?”

“It’s seven.”

“No way.” Emma sat straight up in her seat, her eyes wide with panic, hands planted on her desk to force herself to stay seated. “Seven? They told you that?”

“No. But they’ve got this floor plan.” I gestured to the image Ms. Slater was projecting. “It’s of the whole school. And there were seven push pins on it, in different clusters. Like markers. I definitely recognized two in the chapel.”

“Seven,” Emma repeated, staring at nothing.

I let my eyes drift over the faces of the other girls in AP US, wondering if any of them knew. If any of them were one of the seven. If, maybe, this were only the beginning.

The bell rang, and I was gathering my things to go when Ms. Slater stopped me.

“Colleen? Could you hang back a second?”

“Sure,” I said.

We waited while everyone filed out. Emma loitered until she saw that Ms. Slater wanted to talk to me alone. She left, but not before squeezing my arm in good-bye. When the room was empty, I made my way to Ms. Slater’s desk.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You tell me,” Ms. Slater said, handing me a sheet of paper.

I took it from her, and frowned. For a minute the markings on it didn’t make sense. Lots of red Xes and question marks.

“You want to tell me what happened?” Ms. Slater asked, leaning back in her chair and toying with a pen. She clicked it to open the tip, then clicked it closed.

“I’m . . .”

I looked more closely at the paper. There was a 65 written at the top. Sixty-five? Sixty-five what?

Oh my God.

It was my pop quiz.

A deep pit of panic groaned open beneath my feet, and I felt myself plunging into it, down into the darkness, spinning and clawing at the walls and unable to stop myself from falling. The hand holding the pop quiz trembled.

Ms. Slater clicked the pen again, in slow motion, like the rumble of a cannon.

“Sixty-five?” I said, my voice thick.

Click. Boom.

“I know. I thought from your comments in class that you were keeping up with the material. Especially given that you and Fabiana are—”

I knew what she was about to say, and I cut her off, sputtering with rage.

“Sixty-five? This is a crock!” I spat before I could stop myself. I had never gotten such a low grade. Never. Not once in my life. It wasn’t possible. She must’ve made a mistake.

Ms. Slater’s face hardened.

“Colleen, I know you’re upset, but that language isn’t appropriate.”

Appropriate! I’ll tell her what’s appropriate. Me not having a 65, that’s what’s effing appropriate. My chest constricted, one hand crumpling the quiz in my palm, as the walls of the pit of panic edged closer, closing me in.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my throat tight. “But I can’t have a sixty-five. That is not possible.”

My GPA was blown. Fabiana would get valedictorian. I wouldn’t get into a good school. It would be over. All of it. All the years of hard work, the late nights sweating problem sets, the volunteer work, the extra credit, the research papers. None of it would matter, because this one woman—who was she, anyway? What gave her the right to decide? One stupid quiz about one stupid thing that happened three hundred years ago to a bunch of people nobody cared about, that didn’t have anything to do with real life.

“It’s not only possible, it’s probable, if you don’t do the reading. That’s how it works.”

Ms. Slater was watching me, not unsympathetic exactly, but not giving an inch either. I groped blindly for a chair and sat down, hard.

“I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

I felt the inside of my nose getting tight and prickly, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from crying. I wasn’t about to let some random goddamn substitute teacher see me cry.

“What kills me,” Ms. Slater said, laying her pen delicately down on the desk blotter, “is that I’d really designed it to be an easy one for you guys. All you had to do was skim the material to get an A. I figured, y’all are seniors, you’ve worked hard, the AP is there waiting at the end, right? Why not toss you a softball once in a while? Everyone else did just fine on it. Yours was the only failing grade.”

I was too angry to see straight. I was sure I’d faked my way through enough of the short answers to pull off a B. A B and I would have been fine.
Failing grade
. Didn’t she see what this one quiz would do to me? It wasn’t fair. I’d worked too hard. Ms. Slater swam back and forth before me in a liquid haze of red.

I glared at her with a flash of bitterness and said, “Well, it won’t matter anyway, when Mr. Mitchell gets back.”

“It won’t?”

“No. He’ll throw out whatever you had us doing anyway, so what difference does it make.”

I wasn’t sure if it was true, what I was saying. But I knew I wished it were true. Mr. Mitchell would never judge all our hard work based on some BS pop quiz. He was far too intellectual for that. And who was Ms. Slater anyway? Where the hell had she come from? What did she know?

My life was such a careful balance, a fragile nexus of work and attention and preparation and planning, like the old vaudeville trick of spinning plates on poles all over a stage, running from one to another to another, not letting any of them fall. I’d been so good at it, the running and the spinning. I’d been getting up before dawn and staying late after school and running and spinning the plates for as long as I could remember. I was getting so tired. I didn’t want to run and spin anymore. But I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know who I would be, if one of the plates broke.

I hated Mr. Mitchell for getting sick. I hated Ms. Slater and her goddamn
y’all
for thinking pop quizzes were something that it was okay to give us. I hated my friends for doing the reading and acing the quiz. I hated myself for not.

Ms. Slater got to her feet with a heavy sigh and roamed to the blackboard, where she took up an eraser and started wiping the day away, one stroke at a time, her back to me.

“Well, Colleen,” she said. “The thing of it is, Mr. Mitchell’s not coming back.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“What do you mean, he’s not coming back?”

She placed the eraser back in the tray and turned, leaning against the blackboard, arms folded over her thin chest, the wickedest of her eyebrows cocked at me. It occurred to me that she would get chalk all over her ass, leaning like that. The thought made me feel marginally better.

“Just that. He’s not coming back, and the university job market doesn’t start up again until next fall, which means we’re stuck with each other for the rest of the year. So we’re going to have to come up with a way to move past this. Now, I know you’re upset, and I think I’ve got a pretty good understanding of why, but that doesn’t make it okay for you to behave that way. I’d like an apology, please.”

Stuck with each other? I looked down at my hands, still chewing the inside of my cheek. I wiped the suggestion of tears away from beneath my eyes and felt shame boiling red on my forehead.

“I’m sorry. I was just—” My voice caught. “I’m pretty upset. I didn’t mean to freak out at you.”

Ms. Slater’s expression softened and she returned to her desk, where she leaned forward on her elbows.

“That’s better. Thank you. I accept your apology. Now.” She paused. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?”

I brought my hands to my forehead and rubbed. My fatigue was deadening. I could have put my head down on the desk and fallen asleep right there.

“I don’t know,” I said from behind my hands. “It’s just . . . I’m just . . .”

She waited. I appreciated that she waited. Teachers at St. Joan’s are big finishers of other people’s sentences.

“I’ve been working so hard. And I’m so tired.” My voice came out small.

“I know you have,” she said.

We sat for a minute in silence.

“So,” she said. “How’d the interview with the nurse go? Was it as awful as the faculty meeting made it sound?”

I laughed weakly and dropped my hands.

“Worse,” I said, rubbing the corners of my eyes. “God. What I don’t understand is, I thought they’d figured out it was just about vaccines. HPV shots, or whatever. But then they were asking me all about . . .” I paused, embarrassed. “Other stuff. Like how many times I’d had strep throat. How random is that?”

“Pretty random,” Ms. Slater agreed. “Have you had strep throat?”

“Hasn’t everyone had it once or twice? I don’t remember.”

“Well,” she said, “I suppose they have their reasons.”

“I guess.”

A funny expression crossed Ms. Slater’s face. She seemed on the point of saying something else, but then she changed tack and said, “And what’s happening for you with colleges? Did you get in early anywhere, or are you still in applications?”

Ms. Slater was looking at me with such warmth and genuine-seeming interest that a tear escaped my cheek-biting and traced down the side of my nose. “I got deferred,” I whispered. “Williams and Dartmouth. I don’t understand it. I mean, they were both reaches, but still.”

I didn’t speak any of the secret, tarry resentments I thought, things like
How could Fabiana have gotten in early to Vassar? I mean, I know about her grades, but she’s so vacuous
or
I don’t understand why Deena’s not applying to bigger places, even if I should be glad because it means she’s not competition for me like Anjali is.
Or even
Leigh Carruthers should just be packed off to finishing school and call it a day, I mean, don’t they still do that sometimes?
We’re supposed to be positive. We’re not supposed to say this stuff out loud. Especially not about our friends.

“So you’re still applying. No wonder you’re upset.”

I nodded.

She sighed, and said, “Tell you what.”

I looked up quickly, my face alight with hope.

“I can’t vacate the grade. It’s not fair to everyone else.” My hopeful expression slipped. “But we can talk about some extra credit if you want.”

“Oh my God, yes! Really? I could do that?”

She smiled. “Sure. But you can’t half-ass it. There’s going to be work involved. You’ll have to manage your time very carefully so you don’t keep falling behind.”

“That’s fine, I can totally do that. You should know, Ms. Slater, this is really uncharacteristic of me. I never show up unprepared. Never.”

“Yes. Your reputation has preceded you,” she said. There was that wicked eyebrow arch again. “And normally I wouldn’t be having this conversation, since I tend to be pretty strict in my grading policy. But given everything that’s been going on the past couple of weeks, and given your involvement, I think we can make an exception just this once.”

My involvement? Was I involved? What did she mean by that? God, who cared, if it meant I could do something about that 65.

“Thank you so much, Ms. Slater. I really can’t begin to tell you how—” I started to say in a rush.

She cut me off with a smile and a wave of her hand. “All right, all right. Shut up already.”

I smiled back.

Ms. Slater reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a book, and tossed it to me. I snatched it out of the air and looked at the cover.

The Crucible.
Which she had told us was a complete waste of time. I opened my mouth to say something, maybe to object.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said, interrupting my thoughts. “You’re going to write me a ten-page research paper on someone from the Salem panic who’s been either written out or turned into a composite by Mr. Miller here. It’s going to have a solid thesis statement, and it’s going to rely on primary sources and secondary sources. You’re not even going to think about looking at Wikipedia. You’re going to get started on it, and then you’re going to check in with me, and we’re going to decide on a due date together that’s not going to get in the way of the rest of your work. Okay?”

I hugged the play to my chest and beamed at her. The walls of the panic pit opened over my head, letting in a tiny bit of sunlight. “Okay. Yes. Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.” She paused, and then added, “Don’t screw up.”

I gathered my things together and tucked the play under my arm. She really wasn’t that bad. Okay, she was kind of weird, for a teacher. And she was nowhere near as cool as Mr. Mitchell, but still.

Halfway out of the classroom I turned.

“Ms. Slater?”

“Hmm?” She had turned her attention to marking some papers and didn’t look up at me.