Goody Corey’s face drains of blood, and she slips as though she cannot stand. She leans forward against the bar, pressing her breast to it, and more screams burst forth from our mouths as we hold our hands to our breasts as though our breath is being crushed out of us. I hold my hands there, too, and I can almost feel it, I am screaming, the air is being crushed out of me as I watch, and I am helpless to stop it.
“You foul creature!” Goody Pope screams, doubling over with her hands on her belly. “You’re tearing my bowels out!”
Goody Corey turns half of her face to us, and Goody Pope is so overcome with rage that she throws her muff at Goody Corey’s head. The throw goes awry, glancing off Goody Corey’s shoulder, though she winces as though she’s been slapped, more from surprise and shame than from pain. With a guttural screech Goody Pope tears the shoe off her foot and hurls it at Goody Corey’s proud, wincing face. The shoe hits its mark with a thwack and Goody Corey cries out, bringing a hand to her cheek where a fresh gash has begun to ooze dark red blood.
Goody Corey’s feet shuffle, as though she is fighting the urge to run away, and I feel my own feet move, and all of the girls arrayed about me stamp their feet in a thundering chorus as though powered by something wholly diabolical.
Judge Hathorne glances between us and the pitiful woman at the bar, whose eyes well with tears. Blood trickles down her face between her fingers, fanning a dark red stain across her linen collar. At the sight of the blood Abby rises to her feet, teeth bared like a wolf set to tear out the throat of a wounded calf.
“Why did you not go to the company of witches who were mustering before the meetinghouse?” Abby screams, pointing a servant’s finger at the cowering, lordly Goody Corey. “Didn’t you hear the drumbeat? You have familiarity with the Devil! He’s a black man whispering in her ear, her yellow bird sucks betwixt her fingers in the assembly!”
“What yellow bird?” Judge Hathorne says. “You, check her hands.”
A bailiff approaches Martha Corey and says, “You hold your hands out like the judge asks.”
Shaking so that she can barely obey, Goody Corey extends her bound fists out for his inspection. The bailiff peers between each finger, holding her hands gently in his. Abby catches my eye and tries to get me to understand what she wills me to do. I’m trembling, too, and Abby pokes me hard in the ribs and hisses, “Do it.”
I scream, “It’s too late! It’s too late! She’s hidden the teat so you won’t find it. She removed it with a pin and put it on her head!”
It’s nonsense, what I’ve babbled, but the judge waves a hand to catch the bailiff’s attention and says, “Check for it.”
Goody Corey wears her hair like my mother does, brushed straight back and plaited into a heavy braid that’s coiled and fastened at the nape of her neck, tucked up under her coif. It’s held together with hairpins.
The bailiff nods, and Goody Corey says, “But . . .”
He places a hand on the back of her head and forces her to tip her chin to her chest. With his free hand he hunts up into her hair. His eyes light up, and he withdraws a long, sharp hairpin.
The entire assembly gasps.
Abby, sensing her moment, points a vibrating finger at the woman weeping before us, a few threads of gray hair now hanging loose about her shoulders. “She had covenanted with the Devil for ten years! She told me! Six of them were gone, but there’s still four to come!”
Judge Hathorne exchanges a purposeful look with the other magistrates who flank him at the bench.
“All right. Let me ask you this, Goodwife Corey. How many persons be there in the Godhead?”
It’s a catechism question, one that we all can answer without so much as a thought. But Goody Corey has been reduced to tears and sniveling, and stands propping herself at the bar, alone, shaking her head, and saying, “It cannot be, it cannot be. I? But how could I? I never did. I never would. I’m a gospel woman. I love Jesus.” Her speech devolves into gasping and muttering, and the blood oozes down her cheek.
“She’s answering but oddly,” one of the magistrates whispers to Judge Hathorne, who frowns with his woolly brows knotted together, and nods.
“Goody Corey,” Judge Hathorne bellows, and she rolls her eyes at him like a hunted animal. “Do you deny these charges being made against you? Do you mean to say that you’re not a witch?”
She sputters. “No! No! Not I, never I!” She chokes back her sobs, and the audience gathered in the meetinghouse blusters with tension, one voice after another raised against her.
The magistrates lean their periwigged heads together while the assembly murmurs among themselves. I spy Abby out of the corner of my eye, and she’s wearing a hungry smile. Goody Pope is laughing, her eyes bright. I feel what they’re feeling, the intoxicating sense that this squirming wretch who used to scorn us now twists at our mercy, these men with their self-important robes and beefy faces all harken to us, acting at our will. I gaze on the weakened form of Goody Corey, a woman who used to think that she could order me about, could box my ears whenever she felt like it, and as the tears begin to stream down her face, I draw myself up to my full height and I smile.
After that day, I’m empty of pity. Nineteen people mounted the steps to the gallows. Nineteen people heard a final prayer while a mob of friends and neighbors harried them to damnation and threw rotting vegetables at their weeping faces. Nineteen people felt the stool yanked away and their desperate feet kicking at nothing. Nineteen people felt the rope bite into their necks, purpling their mouths, blood vessels bursting in their eyes as the flames of hell licked at their heels. And I condemned them all.
I condemned them all.
Chapter 26
DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS
MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2012
After we got back from the doctor with my prescription, I spent the first three days of spring break asleep. I only got up to go to the bathroom or shuffle into the kitchen looking for something to eat. Once Wheez came in and jumped on my bed, shrieking, “Get up get up get up Colleen get up get up get up!” and I pushed her off with an inarticulate growl and she went running into the other room hollering, “MOM!” but nothing came of it.
Michael had spring break at the same time, but I didn’t see much of him. He’d be at the breakfast table with his earbuds in and give me a wave, but that was about it. He was still halfheartedly reading my old copy of The Crucible. Turned out they read it in eighth grade at St. Innocent’s, so he’d just stolen it to read for school. I considered seeing if he wanted to write my extra-credit paper for me, but then I just didn’t care.
I took the pills they gave me. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t go on the Internet. I told myself I wasn’t going to check my phone either, but I wasn’t that good. Spence went on a ski trip for his spring break with some kids from his school, and it was coed. I pretended to be totally cool about it and not eaten up with jealousy. I didn’t let on. But I confess I liked the text messages he sent, which largely consisted of snowboard reports from Sugarloaf and updates on all the couples who were hooking up. And assuring me that nobody was hooking up with him.
When I finally crept out from my cocoon, my parents acted like it was totally normal for their eldest child to be wearing the same pair of pajama pants that she had changed into several days earlier.
“Coffee?” my mother asked, all chipper.
“Sure,” I grumbled, flopping into my usual seat at the breakfast table.
“Linda, it’s four thirty,” my father said, coming into the breakfast nook from the living room.
“Is it, now,” Mom said, pouring me a cup of coffee and adding milk and sugar, the way she knew I liked it. “I hadn’t noticed.”
I accepted it and took a grateful sip. Feeling started to come back into my hands, and maybe into my mind, too.
“Anjali called,” my mother said. “Said you weren’t picking up your c
ell. I told her you were asleep.”
I scratched in my nest of sleep-hair and yawned.
“And Deena stopped by yesterday morning. I was going to tell her to go upstairs, but she said it was okay, she knew you were tired.”
I blinked in surprise. It felt like I hadn’t seen Deena in weeks.
“She said they’re going to be down at Front Street this afternoon, hanging out. She’s really hoping you’ll stop by.”
A flutter of pleasure rippled through me. Who would think that the idea of seeing my friends in our regular café would actually be exciting?
“Maybe,” I yawned. But she knew I would be there. She knew I was on my way back from wherever I had been.
A while later I walked to Front Street Café, even though I kind of still wanted to be in bed. It was a long walk from our house, but it felt good to be moving, to be out in the air, breathing. Everywhere I looked, spring had planted secret messages for us to find. Waxy green leaves. Daffodils thinking about blooming. The air had that rich, loamy smell that happens when the ground starts to thaw and awaken.
I pushed the screen door of the café open and found Deena, Anjali, and Jennifer Crawford already there, huddled around steaming mugs of tea. They waved merrily at me, and one of them called, “Sleeping Beauty!”
“Psh,” I said, stopping by the counter for my own tea and muffin before flopping into the fourth chair at the table.
Deena dropped a newspaper in front of me.
“You’re right,” Jennifer Crawford said, smiling and elbowing Anjali. “She does have pillow creases on her face.”
“Toldja.” Anjali grinned.
“Shut up,” I said, smiling into my tea.
“Check it,” Deena said.
The headline read “Mass. Department of Public Health Clears Sick School.” I pulled the paper nearer and peered at the article.
Under the headline was a color photo of the stained-glass window from the chapel, the one of St. Joan looking serene while she’s being burned at the stake. The article wasn’t very long. It said that while I was drugged out in bed, Bethany Witherspoon released a preliminary report finding that there was no appreciable level of tricoethylene in the grounds of St. Joan’s Academy, and that although these initial tests were cause for optimism about the Mystery Illness, she and her team would never rest until the true cause of the Mystery Illness had been found and the proper people held accountable.
I looked up. “So she’s gone?” I asked.
Everyone around the table nodded.
“That was quick.”
“I saw her on Good Day, USA this morning,” Jennifer Crawford added. “She said a lot of stuff about increasing government funding for environmental cleanup so that no other girls like us ever have to suffer. Bebe Appleton has started a fund to help with our medical expenses, so you know, that’s something. They made a big deal of it, and Clara Skyped in to say thank you on behalf of everyone. Of course.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Do you think I’ll always sound like Emma Stone when I talk, or will I go back to normal?” Anjali wondered while I continued reading. She touched her throat. The scabs around her mouth had started to clear up.
“I bet you’ll go back to normal,” Deena said.
“Damn,” Anjali sighed into her tea.
The article went on to say that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had consulted with experts at Harvard, Tufts, and Mass General, and their official assessment was that the Mystery Illness had no environmental or infectious cause whatsoever, and that it was instead an unusually widespread group outbreak of conversion disorder. We should all take some time to reflect on the undue stresses placed on teenage girls in America today blah blah blah something blah.
I was distracted by everyone gossiping around the table.
“No way. She’s already walking?” one of my friends said.
“I mean, with a cane, but yeah. That’s what I heard. And that basically it’s just that she’s got to build her muscle tone back. She’s, like, atrophied or whatever.”
“God. Poor Elizabeth.”
“Actually, I think her hair looks better now,” someone else said, not listening to the first conversation.
“Oh, I know, right? Did you see her on TV? It was, like, already growing back.”
“It’s really cute short. She should leave it.”
The paper did not define what, exactly, conversion disorder was. The Department of Public Health was leaving a liaison at St. Joan’s to coordinate our care, and we were all expected to make a full recovery. The newly appointed upper school dean, Father John Molloy, had no comment at press time, but the paper could exclusively reveal that the original set of girls was already showing signs of improvement.
“What about Clara?”
“I heard her mom’s in negotiations to sell the rights.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m not kidding. TV movie. For, like, Lifetime or something.”
“Shut up!”
“Who should play me, do you think?” Anjali asked.
“God, Leigh Carruthers must be freaking out. Does she know?”
“I mean, probably, if I do.”
The paper reported that the final tally for the Mystery Illness stood at sixty-two students, or almost a quarter of the upper school student body at St. Joan’s Academy. “‘We’re just excited for everything to get back to normal,’ concerned parent Kathy Carruthers was quoted as saying. This has been a terrible strain on her daughter, Carruthers said, and anyone who wants to help or get involved can visit their website at . . .” blah blah blah. I flipped the paper facedown.
I slurped some of my tea.
“So,” Deena said, eyeing me.
“So, what?”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
Deena leaned in and whispered, “Did you get it, too?”
I flushed deep crimson and looked at my tea mug while I whispered, “Yes.”
My friends’ hands found my forearms, piling on in an indistinguishable heap. I couldn’t look them in the face just yet.
“Are you okay?” one of them asked.
I nodded. “They’ve got me on some drugs that made me really sleepy at first. But I’m adjusting to them okay. My pediatrician thinks it’s not a big deal. She said since I got it so late in the outbreak, it shouldn’t be too difficult to treat.”
I was scheduled to start cognitive behavioral therapy in May, the first date my mom could get me an appointment. But I didn’t really feel like telling my friends that. I still didn’t feel crazy. The not-feeling-crazy part scared me the most.
“Oh, damn!” Anjali cried, smacking Deena on the arm. “That’s not what you were supposed to ask.”
“What was I supposed to ask?” Deena asked, feigning innocence.
“Dude! You’re supposed to ask if it’s set with Spence for spring formal.”
I blushed as everyone grinned at me.
“Maybe,” I confessed.
We passed the next hour in a pleasant haze of spring formal gossip, discussing strategies to keep Jason Rothstein from showing up in either a tuxedo T-shirt or a gold lamé pimp costume, both of which were on the table, according to Anjali, and whether or not Deena could ask one of the guys she was friends with from St. Innocent’s even though she was still talking to Japan Boy on Skype.
Japan Boy, we learned, had applied to Tufts also. I was starting to think Deena had more going on with him than she’d let on. When she talked about him, her smile got big and silly. We were just getting around to what we were all going to wear—Anjali’s mom thought she’d look beautiful in a sari, but Anj was having none of it, and I was half thinking of asking her if I could wear it instead—when I said, “So, wait, you guys, is Emma coming?”
A look passed around the tab
le. We all settled on Jennifer Crawford, since she seemed to hear things before everyone else.
“Um. She’s got the flu?” she said, raising her eyebrows for confirmation. We all looked at each other and shrugged. “At least, that’s what I heard.”
“That sucks,” Anjali said, toying with her mug and looking at me from the corner of her eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, not meeting Anjali’s unspoken question.
We hung out for a while longer, gossiping, equal parts Mystery Illness rumors and spring formal scheming, until we saw some guys starting to move chairs around and plug in long extension cords and truck guitar cases from the open hatchback of a car outside.
“I think that’s our cue,” Deena murmured under her breath.
“Definitely,” Anjali said, winding her scarf around her neck.
“I dunno,” Jennifer Crawford mused. “The bassist is kind of cute.”
Out on the street, in the damp spring night, Deena asked me if I needed a ride.
“That’s okay. I’ll walk. Thanks,” I said, avoiding looking at her.
“Okay,” she said, giving me a quick hug. “See you at school.”
I nodded, watching her and Anjali walk together under the streetlights to the parking lot. I slid my hands into my jacket pockets and started to walk.
It took me an hour to get to Emma’s house, and by then it had gotten dark. I texted with Spence part of the way—he was coming back from Sugarloaf the next day, and he was sorry to have to tell me this, but he took a tree branch to the face and so he was probably going to have a huge purple bruise for spring formal. I suggested he could rent a tux that was the same color. He Snapchatted me a picture, with his eye literally almost swollen shut and his tongue sticking out in a grimace. I couldn’t help but laugh. When he finally had to go, I used my phone as a flashlight, stepping around the jagged sidewalk cracks.
The porch light was on at Emma’s house, and when I leaned on the bell, her brother, Mark, opened the door. Those Blackburns, seriously. With that pale white hair and those oyster-shell eyes. People’s genes could not be more recessive.