"Me, too," Vera said. She couldn't restrain her smile-grin, really. The grin disappeared just as quickly. She was betraying too much about her own morbid inclinations by responding with too much warmth, too much approval. She gave another one of her little nods to the girl and turned away, busying herself again. "Well," she said, "we'll see you tomorrow, won't we?"

That evening at home, Vera struggled to activate her Wallace School email account. She gave up after her fourth attempt and allowed herself some diversions on the Internet-cleaning out the spam in her personal email account, reading an email from her old grad school friend Elliott, and then turning to the true-crime discussion boards she sometimes lurked (but never posted) on, one of whose topic du jour was the Black Dahlia murder of 1947. A particularly rabid poster was trying to catapult the theory that Elizabeth Short, the bisected murder victim, had been slain by a big-name Hollywood executive. Amateur stuff, Vera thought, and completely unoriginal. Bored, she closed the browser window and then Googled her ex-fiance, Peter, as she sometimes could not resist doing.

There were several hits-mostly links to articles published in the Bond Brook Gazette, all related to Peter Mercier's small business-and then something new, an engagement announcement from that same publication. There was no photo, but the announcement described his betrothal to a florist named Betsy Gillingwater. A second Google hit led her to a wedding registry, presumably set up by the fiancee; she couldn't imagine Peter bothering with something so fussy. Feeling like a consummate stalker, Vera looked at the items Betsy wanted for the marital home-percale sheets, Ralph Lauren towels, and all manner of cookware, including such extras as garlic presses and lemon zesters and something called ramekins, whatever those were. So she's a domestic type-a cook, Vera thought. Peter must be loving this. The one time Peter had made the mistake of asking Vera to bake something for his company potluck, she had had to run out and buy a disposable tinfoil pan at the dollar store. Well, more power to you, Betsy. More power to both of you.

There had been a time when the thought of Peter with any woman who wasn't her would have driven her into a rage that knew no bounds-the sort of obsessive rage that would cause her to fixate on poor Betsy, to imagine terrible things befalling the hapless woman-but now she felt almost nothing. You're getting soft in your old age, girl, she told herself.

She closed her laptop and got up to pour a herself a generous gla.s.s of wine-the cheapest, most vinegary wine she had been able to find in the corner bodega-and, thus fortified, started digging around in her wheeled suitcase until she produced the folder for her morning cla.s.s; email or no email, she could give the hard copy of Jensen Willard's journal a look. She lay down on her bed on her side, gla.s.s of wine resting on the floor next to her-would students be appalled to know that teachers read their writing in bed sometimes?-and began to read. Her eyebrow lifted as she saw the t.i.tle on the cover page for the first time. It was as though the girl had foreseen the subject of that day's lecture-though, she supposed, it wouldn't take the Amazing Kreskin to predict the direction Vera had taken.

That David Copperfield Kind of c.r.a.p: Journal Entry #1, by Jensen Willard I have to admit, I'm a little confused. Do you want to know about me in this journal or do you want to know about Holden Caulfield? Or do you want to know about me in relation to Holden? (Now I'm doing what you do-asking questions.) I'll start with me, I guess, and move on to Holden as needed, or at your say-so.

With every journal I write I feel the need to reintroduce myself in case the previous journal gets lost and leaves the reader with no backstory-no David Copperfield kind of c.r.a.p-whatsoever. After all, I'm no Anne Frank. I haven't got an Otto Frank in my life to recover my journal from the enemy and share my story with the world. Not that I'm comparing myself to Anne Frank in any way . . . well, I guess I just did, but I know it's not a good comparison. A comparison like that could p.i.s.s a lot of people off.

My name is Jensen Willard. My namesake aunt is dead now, from a brain tumor. She already had the brain tumor when my mom got pregnant with me, so my mom got to feeling n.o.ble and promised her dying sister that she'd name her unborn child after her in some way, shape, or form. But my mom didn't have an ultrasound-she was so convinced she was going to have a boy. After I was born, and after my mother inspected my body, searching in vain for a p.e.n.i.s, imagine how screwed she must have felt. She didn't like her sister's first name, Nora. I don't know why. To me, Nora is the name of a girl in an English or Irish novel who has roses in her cheeks and gets the shock of her life when she leaves the provincial lands and is taken advantage of by a cad. (I like that kind of story. Does that surprise you?) Jensen, my aunt's married name, now used as a first name, calls to mind a pretentious, twerpy guy with a pipe in his mouth. Maybe a butler.

I am fifteen years old-I turned fifteen in October. My mother says I have the mental maturity of a forty-year-old and the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, and that's pretty spot-on, I have to admit.

For the longest time I've felt older than everyone else around me. The social climate at school only makes this contrast more obvious. It seems like all my cla.s.smates ever talk about is who's going out with who or what outfit so-and-so got at the mall. I could name names, if you wanted me to, from our very own cla.s.s.

Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey and Autumn Fullerton have fathers who are partnered in a law firm. They are both terrible people and also happen to be c.o.keheads, but all the teachers here at Wallace adore them to pieces. Kelsey Smith and Chelsea Cutler are both jocks who live for softball and field hockey. They're actually as stupid as they come, but their slavish study habits will guarantee their entrance into good colleges later on down the line. Loo Garippa is the biggest poser I have ever met in my life. She wants everyone to think she's all edgy and punk, but she's really this closet happy person who has a new boyfriend every week. Aggie Hamada has never had a tough day in her life, although it's rumored that one time in eighth grade she got an A-minus in science cla.s.s and got grounded for two months because it wasn't an A. Jamie Friedman has a new stepmother and is always talking about how much she hates her, but then in the same breath she'll brag about the new designer outfit her stepmother bought her or how her stepmother is taking her on a skiing trip to Switzerland.

They're all pretty contemptible. All of them yammering on blithely about stupid stuff while the world around them wells up with death and heartache and existential crises, which they don't see or they don't care to see. They don't understand how easy it would be for their lives to be over in a minute.

This is a fact: From the time I was a little girl, I always knew life was more about sadness than anything else.

How did I know this? You mentioned music in cla.s.s the other day. Something about Mick Jagger. When I was little, I used to cry at sad songs coming out of my parents' CD player. I couldn't make sense of most of the lyrics back then, but I could tell sadness from the way singers sang. The minor chords always give it away. I even knew when songs were secretly sad-songs that seemed upbeat enough on the surface but hid a sorrow that maybe even the songwriter didn't want you to know about. I knew other things, too. I knew that most grown-ups really don't know much more than children, though they pretend otherwise, and that it's impolite to let on that you know this when you're a child. From the day I was born, I saw far too much for my own good. I suppose you could say I had the curse of seeing the world in a clear-eyed way while having the manners to keep what I saw to myself.

In some ways I was childlike back then, and in other ways I wasn't. I played with Annabel Francoeur, a girl my age who lived a few houses up the street from me, because I knew that every child was supposed to have at least one friend. We would play our games-girl-games she would dictate, ranging from soap operatic Barbie doll plotlines (Ken sleeps with Barbie's sister Skipper) to games of "house" where I was always The Boy-but instead of feeling as though I were playing a game, I felt as though I were playing the role of a child playing a game and doing a s.h.i.tty job of it. I've gotten better at playing roles since then, I guess.

Sure, I had fun sometimes as a kid; I can remember certain moments, certain silly and meaningless moments, like lying in Annabel's backyard after sundown, the two of us side by side on our backs in the gra.s.s, and me thinking: For the rest of my life I will remember what it feels like to lie in this gra.s.s. I will remember this dark sky. And once I told myself I would remember, I never forgot. Not even now, long after Annabel has stopped wanting to a.s.sociate with me.

When I was about nine years old, I had an epiphany. I was sitting on the embankment of my elementary school playground-alone, like always, because Annabel went to the Catholic school-and a thought occurred to me (or maybe more a premonition than a thought): Life is never going to be better than it is now. After this, it'll just be one disappointment after another. Like I've been trying to say, if something is true, I can feel how true it is. So that's something that's changed me. Once you know something's never going to get any better, you never have to waste energy on false hopes again. It's kind of freeing, really.

And you wonder why a cheery soul like me doesn't have any friends. Well, except maybe for one, if a boyfriend counts as a friend; I do have a boyfriend, sort of. A little later on I suppose I'll have to tell you how I ended up with one of those.

It feels like I'm just getting warmed up-I swear you will be sorry you a.s.signed me this journal-but I am being called down for dinner. It's meat loaf, which means it's going to be another bowl-of-cereal night for me. This journal entry ends on an anticlimax. This reminds me of something-having read all of Catcher (see, I do the shorthand, too), I have to ask if Holden's mother ever cooked him meat loaf? Maybe that was part of Holden's problem, not having a mother who made meat loaf and offered the standby option of a bowl of cereal. Just some food for thought, if you can excuse the bad pun. And P.S., I don't think The Catcher in the Rye is all that great of a book, to be honest, but I know you have to teach it. I like The Bell Jar better.

Her arm completely asleep from resting her weight on it, Vera turned the last page of the journal as though expecting more, then looked again at the cover page. She was impressed with what she had just read. She thought, I must warn her about discussing other students in her journal entries. Then she thought: Who am I kidding? She found the observations too engrossing and too informative to censor. Vera already found herself recognizing the lens through which Jensen Willard saw the world.

Chapter Three.

Around four o'clock every morning, when the last of Dorset's barflies had simmered down and the farmers were not yet awake, Vera often found herself driven out of bed in an attenuated state of alertness. She liked having this small window available to her just before dawn, when the hour was hers and hers alone to claim, and she frequently used this time for writing and researching. On this particular morning she was reading some of her files and transcripts relating to Ivan Schlosser, reviewing his confession of the murder of Heidi Duplessis, the high school girl from Bond Brook.

Why would someone deliver a voluntary confession? was the question Vera had written at the top of her notebook page. Was there some kind of reward involved, real or imagined, in owning up to a crime that hadn't been traced to him? Had Schlosser simply wanted to boast-to take credit for every one of his misdeeds? Looking over the transcripts of his interviews with Detective Leo Vachon, Vera could see no hint of remorse.

SCHLOSSER: I didn't know I was going to stab her until my knife was at her throat [LAUGHTER], but once I started I knew it was the right thing to do. Didn't expect her to scratch up my arms like she did, though. She was a solid little thing. Big b.o.o.bs, big shoulders. It took a few minutes before she went still. Then I took her into the bathtub and cut her up . . .

VACHON: What did you cut her up with?

SCHLOSSER: A tree saw.

VACHON: This was a tree saw you already had or one that you bought?

SCHLOSSER: It was one that was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of my apartment. I think maybe it was the landlord's. I never saw n.o.body use it. I know I never cut up a tree in my d.a.m.n life. Just people.

Vera kept turning pages of the transcript, dropping them on the floor in haphazard piles that she would neaten up later. She read more details about the deaths of Schlosser's two other young victims. They had not died exactly the way Heidi had died.

Vera had been only fourteen years old when Heidi Duplessis, a soph.o.m.ore from her own school, had been forced out of the home where she was babysitting and murdered hours later in the woods. In the hierarchy of high school cliques, Heidi had been a moderately popular girl-a girl who wore expensive, preppy clothes and had a head full of spiral-permed curls. She was known for a ready smile filled with short, white, square teeth that flashed in the middle of her deeply tanned face. Heidi Duplessis, age fifteen: friendly, well liked, unthreatening, but still not someone who would have deigned to speak to Vera, even if their paths had crossed directly.

Heidi had been strangled to unconsciousness before she was stabbed, though one stab wound was ruled as her ultimate cause of death; with Schlosser's other two victims, Margot Pooler and Rosemary Trang, he had skipped the preamble and gone straight to the stabbing. Though Vera knew that killers sometimes switched up their modus operandi, she also couldn't lose sight of the fact that serial killers tended to like the consistency of patterns and that each new mode of killing had its reasons.

Vera also knew the strangler and the stabber had something in common. They didn't mind demonstrating a sense of intimacy toward their victims. They were not afraid to get close. She thought about the papers she had just reviewed and dropped down on her hands and knees, sorting through the pile until she found the page with the pa.s.sage she wanted to read again.

VACHON: What else can you tell us about the murder of Heidi Duplessis?

SCHLOSSER: Well, what do you want to know? It started with choking, like I said. I was holding her throat, and I moved in real close, so if you were looking at us from far away, you'd have thought it's just a man and a woman about to kiss. But my intent was just to get a real good look in her eyes so I could see the life go out of them bit by bit.

Vera copied these exact words into her notebook and studied them, thinking. Now this, she told herself, might really mean something. This might be put to good use somewhere in my Schlosser book. But she was beginning to lose steam, now that the sun was threatening to come up. Two more hours before she had to leave for school, not enough to go back to bed but just long enough to grow weary before her workday even began.

She placed her head on her table, on top of her folded arms, and closed her eyes, still thinking of Schlosser's confession. The words just a man and a woman about to kiss floated through her mind in the disembodied way that thoughts did when she was close to sleep. I could make something of this, she thought from this far-off place, but she knew she would not-not on this morning, at least. The hours never worked in her favor. And even if they did-even if there were finally time enough to begin to write what she wanted to write-something always got in the way of it. Her unfinished schoolwork waiting to be graded. Her lesson plans waiting to be drafted and finalized. Her own fears and doubts causing her to look at the reality of Schlosser like a child peeping through her fingers at something-something she knew she shouldn't see but wanted to.

Vera considered herself a creature of habit-someone who came into her own once she'd carved out a routine for herself.

By the time three weeks of teaching at the Wallace School had pa.s.sed, she felt as though she had begun to get her footing in her three cla.s.ses and had developed an innate sense of the rhythm and pace she could expect from each set of girls. More important, she had a better handle on each girl as a result of reading her journal entries; she had seen each girl's whole being emerge more vividly on the page, though 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.signed 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 j.a.pan's Heian period. ("When you are about to make an astute point in cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 to scribble each item on the board as she mentioned it. She felt she could not get her words out fast enough, could not write fast enough; what she really wanted was to hear what the girls had to say and to see the machinations of their minds.

"I thought one of the themes was about what happens when he doesn't do well in school," Kelsey Smith said. "How he goes down a slippery slope."

"How who doesn't do well in school? Make sure your p.r.o.noun references are clear."

"Holden."

"Thank you. I wouldn't say that's a theme exactly, but it's an important plot point. What else? Any other ideas?"

Harmony Phelps raised her hand. "Guys are a.s.sholes. That could be a theme."

"Is that a universal truth, though?" Vera asked. Some of the girls laughed, as though to say yes. "Don't answer that just yet. I definitely do want to come back to the question of whether you think Holden is, well, an a.s.shole, especially when we get to some of the later chapters. It may come down to a matter of opinion."

"Some people might say that Holden is . . . what Harmony said he is . . ." Jamie Friedman said, "but others might think that it's okay. Because he's smart, so that makes up for it."

"There's different kinds of smart," Martha True said timidly, from the back row.

It was all Vera could do not to look at Jensen Willard. She had a feeling the girl had no shortage of opinions on this subject. Vera's eyes skimmed over her, resting at last on Martha in the back. "Do you think he's smart, Martha?"

"I'd say he's clever."

Loo Garippa raised her hand. "I have a question. It might be kinda off topic."

"Okay."

"What is it with Holden and serial killers? I was looking on the Internet, and I guess serial killers really get into this book. I thought maybe you'd know the answer, with the book you're writing and all."

Vera could have sworn Jensen Willard was smiling demurely, eyes locked on the table. She was wearing another moth-eaten dress that had most likely been a rich black at one time but had dulled to the same charcoal color Vera had seen her wearing before. Over that, she wore an army coat that, by the looks of it, had once belonged to a fellow three times the girl's size.

"That's a bit of a misconception," Vera said, "thanks to Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate President Reagan in the 1980s. Neither of whom was a serial killer, by the way-I suppose you'd call them a.s.sa.s.sins, or would-be a.s.sa.s.sins-but both of whom happened to like the book a lot."

"But why?" Loo asked.

"It's probably because Holden talks about wearing a people-shooting hat," Chelsea Cutler said. "That's kind of weird, isn't it? He has this funny hat, and he's running around his room telling his roommate or whoever that he shoots people in that hat."

"He doesn't mean it," Jamie said, in the sort of indulgent tone a mother might use to excuse a toddler with a biting problem.

Autumn Fullerton was stroking her hair as though bored. "He might mean it. You never know. Maybe later on, after the book ends, he could go on to kill someone." Vera recalled that Autumn had read the entire book. This told her all she needed to know of what the girl thought of Holden.

"I know this might be controversial of me to say, but I'd submit that anyone could kill someone," Vera said. "Anyone is capable. The only reason why most people don't do it is because they'd feel guilt or shame if they did, and rightly so. The people who kill are those who have no guilt or shame. Personally, I think Holden has both. That's why it's unlikely he'd be capable of any serious violence. As you read more, you just might decide that he's a kind person who's capable of love."

"Really? I don't think he loves anyone but himself," Harmony Phelps sniffed.

A flurry of responses rose over that, with several girls trying to outtalk one another-Autumn, Cecily-Anne, and Harmony the loudest of them all. Seeing that she'd opened the floodgates of healthy debate pleased Vera; the fact that some of the quieter girls in the cla.s.s had jumped into the fray felt like a success of sorts, even if the discussion had steered toward dangerous waters. Vera wondered if she had been wrong to say what she had said-that anyone could kill someone. It seemed like one of those glib comments that wouldn't hold up under logical scrutiny or, more distressing still, could be taken out of context: Hey, Mom, do you know what my English sub said today? She said we all could be murderers! Try as she might, she couldn't seem to keep her interest in true crime out of the English cla.s.sroom. But Loo Garippa had started it, not she.

At the end of cla.s.s, Vera practically had to yell over the girls: "Please note the reading a.s.signment on the board. And don't forget, I'm collecting journals on Friday-at least two entries from each of you."

Every cla.s.s, Vera knew, had its regular latecomers and those who were slow to leave at its close. She had come to expect to see Jensen lagging behind the others, but Sufia Ahmed, who was usually eager to get on her cell phone and out the door as soon as cla.s.s was dismissed, was not one who tended to stay behind. On this day, however, she remained in her seat, hands folded, studying Vera with her large, grave, liquid eyes while the other girls gathered their things and left. The cla.s.s was empty except for her and Vera and, of course, Jensen, who was bent over tying her bootlace, the muddy sole propped against the chair where she'd sat.

"Miss Lundy, I would like to speak to you," Sufia Ahmed said in her soft voice. Vera had to step close to her just to hear her.

"Yes, Sufia, what is it?"

"What you said today? I do not think it is right."

Here it is, Vera thought-a moral dissenter at last. "Are you referring to my comment that anyone can murder someone?" Vera asked gently.

"Yes," Sufia said. "And I do not think such things are right to talk about in cla.s.s."

"I absolutely don't mean to be offensive to anyone. Please bear in mind that my opinions are just my opinions; you're encouraged to think critically, to question what I say. But what is right and wrong for me to bring up in cla.s.s is my determination to make."

"I am here to learn about the literature of America and of Europe, the great literature of all the world. I am not here to learn about killing. Killing was one of the reasons my parents fled their country."

Vera nodded, shutting her eyes for just a fraction of a second. She could not help but feel a pang in her heart, hearing Sufia's words. "I understand what you're saying," she said after a moment's pause. "But the dark side of human nature is something that is represented in much of the great literature you will read. You really can't escape it."

Sufia shook her head slowly from side to side, her large eyes sad. "I do not think you understand. You say you do, but I don't think you do. These things you say in cla.s.s-maybe I will ask Dean Finister if it is okay for you to speak of such things."

"Oh, Sufia. I'm so sorry you feel this way, I really am. Do you have some time to talk this through? I don't have another cla.s.s for a while yet."

"I have my American foreign policy cla.s.s now."

"Can we schedule some time to talk later, then?"

"I will think about this," Sufia said, and she turned and seemed to float out of the room, as she always did, with her light, precise walk and the hem of her traditional Somali dress rippling behind her.

Vera rubbed her eyes as though to clear them of something she wanted to be rid of. Well, now you've done it, she thought, and tried not to think about the greater implications of this encounter with her student. Surely Sufia would forget all the day's cla.s.s discussion before she could even think of reporting it. Vera knew how mercurial kids were, changing their moods and whims on a dime. But what if she didn't forget? What if Vera's careless comments made their way back to the dean?

Vera wondered if Jensen Willard, who was finally moseying toward the door, had been listening to the whole exchange. If so, she decided not to let on that she knew. There were other matters to discuss, long overdue. She closed her eyes again and counted to ten, knowing that the girl would still not have pa.s.sed through the door by the time she had recollected herself. "Jensen?" she said. "Could I speak to you for just a minute, please, before you go?"

The girl came and stood by her chair with about the same gusto with which one might approach a firing squad. Leaning in toward her and speaking in a near whisper, Vera said, "I've been meaning to tell you for a few days now-there's a reason I haven't returned any of your journal entries. I want to hang on to them a little longer so I can write some decent comments on them-give them the response they really deserve. But on the whole, I'm impressed with them. Really impressed."

"Thanks," Jensen said, looking a little surprised. Surprise was the first glimmer of any emotion that Vera had ever seen her display.

"While you're not writing exactly what I had in the mind for a Catcher journal, I want you to keep doing what you're doing."

"I can make it more about the book if you want. More of a literary a.n.a.lysis."

"If you can work in a bit more a.n.a.lysis, that'd be great. But I'm really pleased with how you've started."

"I have more," Jensen said.

"More?"

"In my bag. I didn't know if you'd want this today or not." The girl reopened her knapsack and withdrew another bundle of pages, bound as before. "I might have more entries for Friday, too. Is that all right?"

"Sure," Vera said. "If you write the pages, I'll read the pages. However many you've got."

"Some teachers don't like to do that. They don't want to read extra."