Read Online New England White by Stephen L. Carter - Free Book Online Page A

way labeled them. Her activities were eerily eclectic. History Club, coalition for animal rights, trivia bowl team. A strange, conflicted child. Loved hip-hop but sang in the medieval choir. Worked crossword puzzles and anagrams like a demon but suffered from unsuspected misspellings whenever she wrote a paper. Served as vice-president of both Young Republicans and COGS, the Coalition of Gays and Straights. She was a declared and aggressive pacifist but liked to read about war. The shelves in her bedroom sported books on famous battles, as well as plastic models of warplanes and ships built from kits and a collection of yellowing board games from Avalon Hill, unearthed at estate sales and on eBay: Gettysburg, Waterloo, Iwo Jima. Some evenings, she would walk around the house with a volume on some ancient battle in her hands, chanting like a monk from the Middle Ages. Lemaster refused to put up with it, but Julia, when acting alone, could not seem to make her stop. “It makes me happy, Moms,” the teen would insist, knowing how to make her mother bend. Julia only wished that fewer of Vanessa’s chants had the timbre of funeral marches.
    At first it had been all right: Vanessa, in October a year ago, had decided to write her paper on the response in the Landing to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions in the fifties, and began dutifully putting in her time at the public library, the archives of the board of education, and, finally, the Harbor County Historical Society. Then Vanessa announced a change in her topic. No longer did the story about the fifties interest her. Instead, she had grown fascinated by the death of Gina, a loner like herself. Julia, by instinct still a teacher of teens, at once raised an objection: what thesis could she possibly craft around Gina? For Gina’s story was well known. She had disappeared one night after last being seen in the company of a black teenager from the city who, never formally accused of the crime, was coincidentally slain by police just days later, after stealing a car, an event that led to the only race riot in the county’s history. In the meantime, Gina’s body washed up. She had been sexually assaulted, police said, and had fought back.
    Vanessa answered that she did not care about the thesis, she cared about poor Gina. She would say no more. The Carlyles fretted. Other AP history students over the years had found themselves enchanted by Gina’s story, but none of them—Lynn Klein warned Julia—had written good papers. Even Preston had taken a brief look, before abandoning the topic for a richer one. Julia consoled herself, and her husband, with the fact that the term paper was not due until March, and if their daughter seemed a little bit lost at sea, she was at least getting an early start on the journey back to safe land. Then Vanessa began to avoid her friends, her grades began to slip, and Lemaster, to whose immigrant sensibility the report card was everything, was ready, as he put it, to take measures.
    But Vanessa beat him to it, torching the car on the thirtieth anniversary of Gina’s death, and drawing the family into its current spiral.
    “I did it for Gina” was the only explanation she ever offered: to the team of psychiatrists at the university hospital, to her therapist, Vin Brady, to her parents, to her eager classmates, among them That Casey, whose interest in her never ripened beyond casual dating until after the fire.
    Vanessa did finally finish the paper, although not until April, the final product every bit as dismal as her parents and her teacher had feared, for she presented little more than a handful of newspaper accounts reporting that Gina had vanished, and that the disappearance remained unsolved. “You need a stronger thesis,” wrote Ms. Klein, “and a larger diversity of evidence.”
    Vanessa asked if she could do another draft. Ms. Klein said of course, but made no promises to change her grade. Seven months later, Vanessa