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.
“What happened to Mr. Mitchell? Did he quit or something? I thought he was out sick.”
Now she looked up. A shadow darkened her face. “You really don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” Ms. Slater said, “I’m afraid all I can tell you is, you won’t be seeing him again. And not to worry about it.”
The substitute teacher gave me a long look, as though sending me a telepathic message. But whatever it was, I wasn’t getting it.
“Thanks,” I said, and slipped out the door.
INTERLUDE
SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS
MAY 30, 1706
She bit you?” Reverend Green exclaims.
“Yes.”
“And you think the marks on her arm came from her biting herself.”
“Yes. Though maybe she had Betty Parris bite her, too. To make it look better. Abby had a way of making people do things.”
“Some people have that way about them,” the Reverend says. “As though they compel you from inside your own mind.”
“They do,” I agree, watching him.
“But you must’ve gone straight downstairs and told them what had happened.”
My right fingertips brush over the skin inside my left wrist. A semicircle of pale white marks still lies there, a memento of Abby Williams that will always scar me.
“I didn’t.”
I bring my gaze up to meet his. I hate showing him how wretched I am. But that is why I’ve come. So that at last, someone will know.
It’s some days later, around February 25, when I’m at the table peeling potatoes with one of my sisters. Our only servant at that time, a sullen girl named Mercy, is busy brewing, and my mother squints over her needlework, making a sour line of her mouth when she drops a stitch. My father is looking over his accounts. The previous day my aunt visited, after many weeks of us not seeing her, and there was a dreadful row that I didn’t understand. Now my father’s spent all day in his books, scribbling figures in the margin. Every so often my mother glances at him with worry in her face. But it’s not my place to ask.
I haven’t been back to the parsonage, and I’ve told no one what Abby’s done. I’ve bandaged my welts myself, but they’re starting to seep and itch.
If the rumors are true, several worthy gentlemen spent the last many days up in the parsonage attic, gathered about Abby and Betty’s bedsides, united in prayer. They’ve fasted, and Reverend Parris’s been heard to claim that Satan is laying siege to Salem Village, and that the village must look into its soul and find what sin we’ve committed that’s brought such misery to bear.
My mother has her theories about which families might be harboring the sin. My father has them, too.
“Coreys, I’ll warrant,” she’s muttered. “And those Procters. He’s a godless man. Not been to meeting since I don’t know when. And his first wife never kept the house that way. She was a gospel woman, but this one . . .” She shakes her head and tsks over Elizabeth Procter’s housekeeping.
The talk of Betty and Abigail is nothing but pity for their suffering Christian souls. They are innocent lambs being punished for the sin that’s hidden in the heart of the village, and we should all examine our souls with open eyes to root out the evilness within.
I’m prising the eye out of a potato with a paring knife when the sound of hoofbeats drawing up to the yard outside causes me and my sister to look up. The creak of wagon wheels, and a young girl’s voice says, ?
??Thank you, Uncle.”
Then a sharp rapping on the door.
“Get it, Mercy,” my mother says. She’s learned that there’s no point waiting for Mercy to know what her duties are without us telling her.
Without ceremony Mercy stalks to the door and pulls it open. A stooping man of middling build and grizzled appearance steps in and hands the servant his hat. He stamps the snow from his boots and looks around. Behind him trails a girl about my age in a cloak too big for her, who beams when she sees me.
“Thomas?” he asks. “Good day to you, Goody Putnam. Girls. Is he in?”
Mother has put her sewing aside and gotten to her feet.
“Dr. Griggs.” She comes over to take his hand. “Yes. He’s in the best room. I’ll take you.”
“Sit with the girls, Elizabeth,” Dr. Griggs says to the creature behind him with a gesture to us. “Make yourself useful.”
Betty Hubbard rushes over and puts her arms around my neck. I return the embrace. She’s gotten taller since last I saw her, which doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was before the snow, that’s sure. Now she’s the same height as me.
“Ann!” she cries. “I begged him to let me come.”
“Come and sit, Betty,” I say, bringing her to the bench.
I hand her a potato so that we may both look busy while we talk. She turns it in her palms. We can hear muffled adult voices in the other room, but we can’t hear what they’re saying.
“We’re on our way to the parsonage,” Betty Hubbard informs me in a whisper. “Reverend Parris sent for Uncle special, and I made Mother have him take me. Said I was a friend of Betty Parris’s, and it would do her well for her to see me there.”
I laugh.
“Scamp, you,” I say. “Since when were you a friend of Betty Parris?”
Betty Hubbard, the Other Betty, smiles behind her wrist and says, “Well, I would be her friend, if she’d have me. And I do wish her well, hand to heaven I do. She’s so little and frail. But how are you, Ann? It’s been an age since I saw you. Isn’t the cold wretched this winter? I don’t hardly go out at all, and you must not either. Mother says it’s the worst she can remember, and you know she can remember since before Moses was found in the rushes.”