I have let him kiss me, but we haven't gone further than that. Kissing isn't quite as bad as I imagined, but it isn't exactly what I would call good, either. His nose (which is sizeable) always knocks into mine (which is also sizeable), and his lips always feel chapped, and the whole thing feels kind of invasive. "You're a very tense kisser," he told me once, which is probably true. I wish people would kiss the way they did back in those old black-and-white 1940s movies, with their shoulders hunched up and their faces rigidly jammed together. It seems better than those probing, messy, exploratory kisses you see in movies today. But I guess I'm lucky that Bret doesn't show much interest in going further than that-from what I understand, from movies and books and such, that's pretty unusual.

I don't put a lot of faith in love and s.e.x. I think it's kind of lame, if I'm being honest. I think people start having s.e.x at about the age their parents stop hugging them because they still want that infantile closeness to someone that they used to have, except it's all muddied up in s.e.xual desire. Maybe my views are tainted by my parents' weird combination of openness and close-mindedness; once, when I asked my mother to explain a pa.s.sage about male-on-female oral s.e.x that I'd found in one of her books, her reply was, "A man's face doesn't belong down there." I don't know. I haven't sorted this all out in my mind.

During the many phone conversations Bret and I have had since last July, I've found there are some things I can talk to him about and some things I can't. For instance, one time I was lying on the dining room carpet after having drunk most of a bottle of cough syrup, which had somehow made me feel more depressed instead of having the desired effect of making me feel mildly drunk. We had just got done talking about the mating habit of insects, specifically this mite that leaves its sperm behind in intricate patterns for the lady mite to sit on, if she approves of the artist's work. I said I thought that was romantic. Then Bret started telling me about this guy who lived in one of his dorms who'd gone to visit his family for the weekend and had shot himself. He said, "He was this brilliant musician. I can't believe he did it with a gun. I'm not even sure where he would've gotten one-not from his house, I know that. I met his mother once, and she had this huge peace sign tattooed on her leg and a 'Bread, Not Bombs' b.u.mper sticker on her Prius."

Then, without even knowing I was going to say it, I said, "Sometimes I think it's a good thing I don't know how to use my stepdad's gun."

Bret paused so I could hear the full measure of his distaste. "Your stepdad has a gun?"

"Yes, the service pistol he got issued in the navy. I tried to pick it up once, but it's too big for my hand-about three pounds. Still, sometimes I think about what it'd be like to bring it to school and hold a cla.s.sroom hostage. I could go up and down the rows of desks, pointing the gun at people, and decide right then and there who'd live and who'd die. Wouldn't that be interesting? I don't think I'd know what I'd do unless I was actually in that situation. Maybe I wouldn't even shoot anyone. Maybe I'd just make them think I would."

"I would call that extremely uninteresting," Bret said, "and definitely not romantic."

He didn't understand at all. He didn't understand that I was just blowing off steam when I thought about these things, like I'd done with Scotty. That was the last time I brought up anything serious or personal like that with him. Since then, we've stuck to safe subjects-subjects he likes. Whether or not dark matter exists. Whether homeless people are visionaries. Whether Andy Warhol was really an artist. The number of starving artists who are actually starving.

With Bret being away at Columbia, we don't even have phone conversations that much anymore because of the long-distance bill. So now it's just down to Sundays. And that's what got me started telling you about all this in the first place-because of that call I just got. That call where he seemed distant, though maybe I just imagined it.

This is part of the reason why my parents don't like Bret. They say he doesn't seem that invested in me. My mother always says, "An investment is something that you give to someone that you can't get back." Still, Bret's about as invested in me as anyone else has ever been. And this, to me, has come to mean a whole h.e.l.l of a lot-enough so that I don't know what I'd do without him.

I'm going to try to go back to sleep now. I didn't mean to go on this long, but now I have, and I've worn myself out-and you, too, probably, if you actually read all this.

Vera laid the last page of Jensen's journal on her table. She wanted to write a comment on the girl's paper, an in-depth comment thanking her for the entries she'd written thus far-the sheer volume of them and the quality of thought therein. But somehow she could not think of how to respond to Jensen without revealing her own stories-stories, she thought, that were best kept to herself.

Instead, she took out a fresh piece of paper and began to write a response to affix to the end of Jensen's journal entries; she preferred the old-fashioned approach of handwritten feedback, though most teachers she worked with now relied on computers.

Jensen, This is a general response to all the journals you've submitted thus far. I've made individual notes in the margins of each, responding to lines and phrases and sections that struck me particularly. What I want to say most of all, though, is that it is a pure pleasure to read your writing. I am honored by your candor, honored to know you have trusted me as an audience.

Your emotional honesty and flair for writing are very good for someone your age. I appreciate how the entries range from savagely funny (even a little bit Holdenesque at times, which I'm sure isn't accidental) to melancholy and derisive. You cover the whole spectrum of moods here. Though you make some statements that might alarm some readers, I want you to know that I don't disregard these comments, but I am not easily shocked by them, either. I am someone you can always come to with such thoughts and issues, and if coming to me with them helps, then so much the better. You mentioned something about a therapist in one of your entries-do you ever think about trying a different one? Do you think there would be any value in doing so?

Sometimes seeing the world too clearly can misfire and result in hurting oneself badly, but in my opinion, the clarity is still worth it in the end. In the best-case scenario, it can make you something quite special in this world. I know this may offer you little consolation now, but it is something to keep in mind for the future.

Sincerely, Vera Lundy She had considered signing it, "Yours, Vera Lundy," but decided at the last minute that that might be too much. She had said quite enough already, even while trying not to.

Chapter Four.

The first morning of her fifth week of teaching, Vera sat reading an online journal article called "Criminology and the False Confession," written by a criminal psychologist named T. E. Rubin. It was still dark out-not yet 5:00 A.M.-and her overhead light burned over her as she stretched out catlike on her bed, listening to the starchy calls of the chickadees outside her window, vocal and vigorous after a long and subdued night. The article stated nothing she didn't already know, yet it struck her as especially resonant, the way a certain song heard at a certain time seems to hold all the answers to the world.

When the person making the false confession is delusional, the false confession becomes his reality. But in the case of the nondelusional confessor, the confession itself helps him to feel grounded in a reality that had heretofore rejected him. Taking credit for a crime often becomes a highly public action, one that the world responds to. The confession, then, becomes a misguided attempt at achieving intimacy between him and the rest of society.

It was interesting, Vera thought, to compare Ivan Schlosser's ready confession (Well, what do you want to know?) to the initial false confession of Ritchie Ouelette. Had Ritchie, too, had a moment when he thought a confession might bring him closer to the world instead of further away from it, like a kid who seeks negative attention in a wrongheaded attempt to garner a mother's love?

Looking up from her reading and tapping her pen meditatively against the page, Vera smiled to herself. She knew what she and her girls would be discussing first thing tomorrow.

"Intimacy," Vera announced at the beginning of her first-period cla.s.s. "Isn't that a pretty-sounding word? Intimacy. Some people name their daughters Chast.i.ty. Why not name them Intimacy? It has just as much of a ring, doesn't it?"

Clutching her library copy of The Catcher in the Rye, Vera paced the floor of the morning cla.s.s, speaking of intimacy and how it related to Holden Caulfield's fleeting desires to connect with the opposite s.e.x. "What do you make of that behavior?" she asked her students. "What do you think is the driving force behind it?"

"Desperation," Jamie said.

"Ah," Vera said, giving Jamie a congratulatory little rap on her desk as she walked past. "Good answer. But what does desperation mean? Have you ever felt it? Tell me what desperation feels like."

"It feels like . . . grasping at straws," said Katherine a.r.s.enault, who seemed to have roused herself from the dead at that mention of intimacy.

"Good, Katherine," Vera said, and then remembered the way the girl had signed some of her recent journal entries. "Or do you prefer to be called Kitty?"

"I prefer Kitty."

"All right then, Kitty. Why is Holden Caulfield desperate and grasping at straws in The Catcher in the Rye? What would make a sixteen-year-old boy feel so desperate?"

"Hormones," Loo Garippa deadpanned.

"More than that."

"Loneliness?" Martha True said.

"To say the very least, yes. Here he is, wandering around New York City alone, and he has no idea what to do with himself. Lost in his own hometown, practically."

"New York City is a good place to be lost," Jensen Willard said. It was the first time she had ever actually contributed a comment during cla.s.s, and Vera irrationally found herself wanting to hug the girl.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Have you ever visited there, Jensen?"

The girl nodded. But the invitation Vera had thrown her way, this small encouragement to say more, fell flat, for she fixed her eyes on the table before her and refused to look up again.

"Let's run with this idea of loneliness," Vera said, turning away from Jensen and trying to ignore the tug of rejection she felt. "It's such an important part of understanding Holden's character. And isn't it an important part of understanding the teenage experience, too? Isn't it a lonely process, sorting out who you are emotionally and intellectually?"

There were blank looks, a couple of shrugs. Vera was not completely unsurprised by this noncommittal reaction. After all, what teenage girl wanted to be the first among her peers to own up to this idea of sorting things out?

"Funny thing about admitting that you're lonely," Vera said. "It's like saying you're depressed. People think it's contagious. No one wants to be around you if you admit to loneliness or depression."

She was killing the discussion. As though ill.u.s.trating her own principle, the mere mention of the words loneliness and depression cast a pall over the room, an almost palpable recoiling. She knew she had better shift gears.

"Let's talk about something else, then, that's not so unrelated if you think about it: Holden as a liar. He's always presenting himself as something he's not. How does his tendency to lie or embellish tie into his loneliness? What might be the reason behind embellishing stories like Holden does? Do you think he's trying to impress other people? Is it that he's not happy with the real stories or perhaps doesn't know the real stories yet? Either way, this goes back to what I said, about sorting things out intellectually and emotionally. And that kind of sorting-out process is the hallmark of adolescence itself, the key to coming of age."

"Coming of age to do what, though?" Aggie Hamada asked.

"Get secondary s.e.x characteristics," Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey said primly.

"Be on the rag," someone else said in a stage whisper.

Vera cleared her throat. "Come on now, girls. What are the motivations behind a lie? Think about it."

After a few seconds, the answers began to come.

"To hide something?"

"To protect someone else."

"To make yourself look good."

"To fool yourself or others."

"Good answers, all of you." Vera was growing excited. She was scarcely aware that her pace around the cla.s.sroom was quickening or that her low voice rose, rich and full-throated, in antic.i.p.ation of the narrative she was about to tell.

"Let me tell you a quick story about a real-life adolescent who lived a lie for a little while. Any of you ever hear of Penny Bjorkland?"

Just as Vera had expected, no one had. She slowed her pace around the cla.s.sroom, rubbing her hands together. She shot an almost defiant glance at Sufia Ahmed, who was sitting at her desk with her hand curled around a pen, ready to take notes.

"Penny Bjorkland was a seemingly ordinary teenager who lived in California in the late 1950s. One day she woke up and told herself, 'Today is the day I will kill someone.' That someone turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old gardener named August Norry, who had the misfortune of offering her a ride that day. She fired eighteen bullets into his head, torso, and limbs. When the crime was later linked to her gun, she seemed unapologetic. She was described by the cops as a typical, gum-chewing, ordinary teenager with a tendency to giggle. When asked why she had done it, she said she had wanted to know what it would feel like to kill someone and not to have to worry about it afterward."

"Cree-pee, man," Loo Garippa said. "That's just weird."

"I daresay it's the normalcy with which she approached it that made it weird. This is a pretty extreme ill.u.s.tration of the adolescent's weakness in decision making, planning, and impulse control. On a much lesser scale, one can certainly see this in Holden Caulfield. Almost everything he does is based on impulse."

"But impulses aren't always bad," Cecily-Anne said, surprising Vera.

"No, of course not, Cecily-Anne. Can you think of a good impulse you've had recently?"

Cecily-Anne exchanged a glance with Autumn, and both of them giggled. Vera had the feeling they were laughing at her. "Well, I bought the Marc Jacobs bag I wanted," Cecily-Anne said, "but it was a really good buy."

Deciding to leave that one alone, Vera turned to the whiteboard and wrote down a word in large, slanting letters: EGO. She began to discuss what ego meant for the adolescent-how it represented the struggle of base, primitive urges against the expectations of society. The battle of what you should do versus what you want to do, deep down. There was a great, mushrooming silence that she interpreted as borderline hostile; she had probably used up the last of the students' goodwill for the day. They probably once again wished they were back with their regular teacher, Mrs. Belisle, woodenly reading lines from Macbeth out loud. Feeling almost perverse as she did so, knowing the students were not warming to this topic, she ended by a.s.signing them a freewrite on the subject of ego.

"Are you going to collect these?" Chelsea Cutler asked.

"Yes, I am going to collect them. Your responses will be part of our discussion next time we meet."

Amid some noisy sighs and the sounds of loose-leaf paper being torn from notebooks, the girls began to write. Vera walked along the desks at the five-minute mark to check on the girls' progress. Some had written only a couple of sentences; others had filled nearly a page and showed no signs of stopping. Jensen Willard sat quietly in her chair, her head bent over her notebook but her pen held slack, the sheet of notebook paper blank before her.

"Thinking?" Vera asked her in a low voice.

"I have a hard time with freewrites," Jensen whispered. "I can't just think of things on the spot."

"It's okay," she whispered back to the girl. But perhaps it wasn't quite fair to the others, allowing Jensen to just sit there while they worked. Her conscience getting the better of her, she added in her regular tone, "Just have it ready to turn in to me on Monday. Cla.s.s is almost over now."

A few minutes later, Vera told the girls to complete the sentence they were working on. "That's all the time we have for today, but please-don't leave without me collecting your journals. And please make sure you've noted the reading a.s.signment I've put on the board. Thank you, and enjoy your weekend. Looks like I'll be spending most of mine elbow-deep in reading." Lest this sounded like a complaint, she added, "I can't wait to see what you've written for me this week."

As though by some mechanism, the students mentally shut off as soon as the words That's all the time we have were out of her mouth. More than half of them were already out of their chairs, waving their journals in front of them; some were already dropping them on her table before she'd finished speaking. Amid this upheaval, Vera pretended to be intent on putting some papers back in her suitcase, all the while crouched on the floor in an awkward way, given that she was wearing an above-the-knee skirt. When she glanced up, she saw Jensen still in her seat, reading something with what looked like absorption.

When she looked up a second time, Jensen was gone.

Between the journal submissions and the freewrites, Vera's first-period folder was now bulging with papers. She felt a mixture of antic.i.p.ation and dread-dread because she knew that reading these works and composing her painstaking written feedback would be an exhausting undertaking. But what would she do, if denied that undertaking? She loved having too much to do. She no longer wanted to remember what it felt like to have empty weekend hours that left her feeling unmoored.

Watching the girls pa.s.s by in the hall, Vera opened the folder again and took out the first paper on top of the pile. It was Kitty a.r.s.enault's. Her previous writing samples had yielded nothing of interest, so Vera had no real opinion formed of her yet; she looked at the freewrite exercise in front of her and slowly picked her way through the spiky, messy, smudged penmanship that filled up most of the loose-leaf page.

EGO, by Kitty a.r.s.enault In THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, Holden is egotistical. He lies to make himself sound better, and he talks about himself constantly. I don't think I am as egotistical as he is. Even when my teachers ask me to, I don't really like writing about myself because I am not sure that I am that interesting really. I should probably tell more lies so that my stories will sound more interesting, but I'm not sure how to do that. I think I only lie when I'm trying to spare someone's feelings. Like if someone gets a haircut and it looks awful and they ask me if it looks awful, should I tell them Yes or No? If they're really sensitive, it doesn't do any good to tell them "Yes, it looks awful," because then they'll just obsess over it and feel worse. And I don't see the point in making people feel worse when I could make them feel better. I am not sure if I have done this freewrite correctly?

Vera smiled to herself, took out her pen, and wrote a few notes at the bottom of Kitty a.r.s.enault's journal. Poor girl, she thought-nice and considerate of others, if a little dull. How lonely it must feel to be a nice, considerate, relatively ego-free teenager.

Next in her pile was Loo Garippa's freewrite.

I think the idea of ego is pretty cool. Especially when you think about ego ident.i.ty and how we add stuff to our personalities or take stuff away in order for us to figure out who we really are. Like Holden putting on that people-shooting hat and taking it off again. I guess my version of a people-shooting hat would be how I'm always trying to change up my appearance. My hair is purple right now, but I've had it blond, blue, black, and pink. I've had it buzz-cut, Mohawked, and dreadlocked. I'd like to get lavender streaks but first I have to wait till more of it grows back because I've fried it from dyeing it so many times. My dad always says: "How come you have to keep changing? What's the matter with the looks G.o.d gave you?" But life is all about changing, and now is the time to do it, right? I don't want to be an old lady of thirty still trying to figure out who I am or what looks good on me or what I enjoy doing. I'm glad this is a time for me to explore my ego ident.i.ty.

Vera read the entry again, running her hand over her face. Not terrible-some of the connections Loo was making were decently observed-but it was not the sort of depth she had been hoping for. She decided to put this entry in the back of the pile until she could think of a suitable comment to write; she moved to the shorter entry on the next sheet of paper, only half covered in Sufia Ahmed's looping script.

I am not sure I understand concepts of Ego. In my culture you think of the community. You think what is best for everyone not just what is best for myself. Thinking "What is Best for Myself" is Western thinking. I think of my family, my parents, my brothers and sisters and how I can make them proud. I do not think Ego needs to exist. I think Ego only leads to bad and evil things like things you speak of in cla.s.s.

"Miss Lundy?"

Vera looked up from her reading and saw a student from her later afternoon cla.s.s standing there, looking sheepish. It was Kaitlyn Fiore, a girl who always had an anxious, scrunched face and had already started emailing Vera to ask her lots of unnecessary questions about the readings and the a.s.signments. "Miss Lundy, I just wanted you to know I typed my journals, but I couldn't print them out for today. My ink cartridge ran out. I hope I don't get late points taken off for this because it really wasn't my fault."

Vera took a few moments to negotiate something that would ease the student's distress. She had finally sent her on her way and was about to return to the journals when another face appeared in the cla.s.sroom doorway-that of Sue MacMasters. She looked blonder than Vera remembered. Was Vera supposed to acknowledge this? Compliment it? She had no sense of etiquette when it came to such matters.

"Vera! How are you?"

"I'm doing well, Sue, thank you. Reading the first major writing a.s.signments. The first ones they've written for me, I should say. That's always an interesting experience."

"A bunch of us from the English department are going to get a bite in the cafeteria at twelve thirty. Why don't you meet us over in the teacher's lounge, and we'll all go over together? We'd love to have you sit with us."

Just like high school, Vera thought, though in high school no one would have professed to love to have her sit with them. She had, in reality, spent most of her high school lunch periods hiding in a bathroom stall. Sue's tone and phrasing didn't seem to suggest that Vera had a choice in the matter; the bathroom stall was not going to be an option this time around.

"I'll come by," Vera said weakly.

"It'll be a good opportunity for you to get to know some of the other teachers in the department better," Sue said, "and for them to get to know you. See you then."

Lunch period found Vera seated with nine other English teachers and Sue MacMasters. The women had all greeted her politely, but after a full round of introductions, Vera found that she could not tell her dining companions apart. She recognized Karen Provencher, the eleventh-grade English teacher whom she saw in the hall sometimes, but the others, despite their wide range of ages, all had a similar manner-bright, alert, cool, privileged. The woman sitting next to her, a ninth-grade teacher who looked as though she had just graduated from college, was wearing an earring-and-necklace set that probably cost more than Vera had earned at Dorset Community College in the past year. Vera picked at her salad, willing some of it to disappear. She hated eating in front of people she didn't know very well. She had grown so accustomed to having her meals at the little table in her studio, eating messy foods with barbaric abandon, licking her fingers while downloading TV programs on her laptop.

Sue's insistence that the English department would love to have her at lunch had been an overstatement, by Vera's estimation. Once the faculty had looked Vera up and down and asked what college she'd gone to and whom she'd studied with, they seemed utterly finished with her and even started asking Sue, "Have you heard anything about Melanie and the baby yet? Are they going to induce labor?" Melanie was Melanie Belisle, the pregnant teacher whom Vera had replaced.

"Do you have any children, Vera?" the woman sitting across from her said. Before she could curb the irrational response, she felt the same mild sense of affront that she always felt when asked that question. It wasn't that she was sensitive about not having children; rather, she always felt insulted when she was mistaken for someone who did have them. "No," she said, "I don't." And maybe some of her irritation had showed in her face because the woman turned to Sue MacMasters and changed the topic altogether.

As the conversation turned to summer vacation plans, the ninth-grade teacher sitting next to Vera said, "Melanie and I used to check in with each other sometimes. I always like to know how my ninth graders are doing as they move forward into tenth grade. You have a lot of my former students now. How do you like them?"

"Oh, I'm impressed with them. They're outspoken and seem to pick up things quickly."

"How is Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey doing? She was a favorite of mine. Melanie's, too. She and Autumn Fullerton are both really exceptional-so wonderfully driven and sensitive. Oh, and of course there's Jamie Friedman, too-she's quite special also. I know Melanie felt bad about having to just up and leave them."

Vera wanted to laugh. She could understand, at least intellectually, why Jamie Friedman would be held up as a model student; her conduct and work ethic were always impeccable. But she found herself hard-pressed to say something equally glowing about the other two girls. "Cecily-Anne and Autumn are a striking pair, aren't they?" she said diplomatically, spearing a sliver of carrot. She wondered if perhaps she had been unfair in her judgments of the two glamorous students, or perhaps Melanie Belisle had seen something she hadn't seen. Thinking for a moment, she asked the teacher next to her, "What about Jensen Willard? Did you have her as a student?"