Read Online What Has Become of You by Jan Elizabeth Watson - Free Book Online

some, of course, presented themselves with more powers of articulation than others. She had hoped that this would happen—that she would come to know them better and that they would come to trust her more, as the exchange of entries and comments grew.
    What she hadn’t expected is that she would become the keeper of their secrets. That they would feel safe confiding in her.
    Who would have guessed, Vera thought, that the beautiful Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey had been in two foster homes before being permanently adopted by a wealthy couple just three years before? And who would imagine that Aggie Hamada, who seemed to have a picture-perfect life, was tormented by her parents’ recent split—especially since her father had left her mother to take up with her baby brother’s nanny? Even Loo Garippa, so outwardly rebellious with her piercings and her eggplant-colored hair, confessed to taking mail-order diet pills that left her with headaches. (Vera had directed her to the school nurse, who was better equipped to handle this problem than she.) Although Vera knew as well as anyone that things were not always what they seemed, she still felt surprised by each new revelation, surprised that the girls would want to share such things with
her
.
    She felt she owed her girls something, and she tried to repay their confidences by breaking up the boyish voice of Holden Caulfield with readings that offered a slightly more relatable (she hoped) female perspective; she assigned Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House,” excerpts from
The Pillow Book
, and Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll.” And when responding to students’ writing, she made it a point to scrawl a few kind words on each girl’s writing exercise—the simple acknowledgment that told them someone was listening.
    The exception to this was Jensen Willard, who had yet to receive any written feedback from Vera. Though Jensen’s follow-up journal entries had been less disclosive than her first, they’d been no less revealing, in their own funny way; following her assigned reading of the essay “Hateful Things,” Jensen had written her own list of hateful things that beautifully spoofed the complaint list written by Sei Shonagon, the famed, opinionated courtesan of Japan’s Heian period. (“When you are about to make an astute point in class, and somebody else raises her hand to put out the obvious and takes the discussion in a stupid direction from which there is no return, that is hateful indeed.”) Vera had come to enjoy her contributions from week to week, but had not felt there’d been enough time to write the lengthy response she wanted to. A simple, supportive scrawl did not seem acknowledgment enough for Jensen Willard.
    By the time the Monday of her fourth week of teaching rolled around, Vera’s classes had a decidedly different feel to them—the difference of attacking her days with a plan instead of flip-flopping between several possible ideas and instinctively choosing the one that felt right in the moment. On this particular Monday, she decided to start her morning class with a ten-minute freewrite on the subject of themes in
The Catcher in the Rye
.
    “Now, theme,” she reminded them, stalking up and down the rows as the students opened their notebooks and rooted around for their pens, “is not always easy to identify before you’ve read a novel in its entirety. Still, I think what you’ve read from
Catcher
should have already provided at least a few hints about the book’s main idea. Take a stab at it. Any guesses are fair guesses.”
    Minutes later, as Vera collected the freewrite exercises—waiting patiently as many of the girls took time to take the fringes off their notebook sheets, piece by scraggly piece—she began to talk about theme as it pertained to the novel they were reading. She spoke of loneliness, alienation, the desire for closeness to another human being, the preoccupation with what is real versus what is false—pausing