What Has Become of You Read Free Page B

quick, came to her: the angry, insistent fists pounding on the windows of her childhood home; the muffled voices exhorting her to
come out from hiding, you weird bitch
; and Vera herself, suddenly much smaller and cowering on the floor in the corner with all the lights turned off so no one could see where she hid.
This is what it feels like to be under siege,
she had thought way back then. Astonishing, the powers that old memories held . . .
    But now, when two girls entered the classroom, they took their seats without so much as a glance at Vera.
    “Hello,” she said to both of them at once, and then added inanely, “Are you here for English?”
    One of the girls nodded. Vera noted that they looked very much alike—both with light-brown hair parted in the middle, both wearing hooded sweatshirts and garish printed pajama pants. Both buxom, with the sort of overripe figures that many local teenagers seemed to have. “Who are you?” Vera asked. “I mean—what are your names?”
    “I’m Kelsey,” the girl who had nodded said.
    “Chelsea,” chimed in the second girl.
    Two more girls came into the classroom as the first two were still shifting around in their seats and unloading their backpacks. Did all high school girls travel in pairs? Vera acknowledged the latest arrivals with a diffident nod. Hesitating, she got up and wrote “Vera Lundy, Tenth Grade, Personal Connections” on the whiteboard. “Lest there be any confusion,” she said aloud, hoping the girls might find this qualification humorous. No one laughed.
    “You’re the new teacher?” one of the newer arrivals said, tossing her hair. She had the kind of cascading blond hairstyle that was so perfectly layered and highlighted that it required a great deal of tossing in order to call more attention to it. She was impossibly tall, to Vera’s thinking—model-tall, at least five eleven. The girl beside her was equally Amazonian—a brunette, olive-skinned, willowy, with a long, elegant face like a model in a Modigliani painting.
    “I
am
,” Vera said, trying to inject enthusiasm into her voice, as though being the new teacher were some sort of delightful accident.
    More girls filed in, a steady stream of them now. The hallways outside the classroom echoed and reverberated with sound. Three minutes to start of class time. Too early to take attendance? Vera felt awkward, not knowing what to say in those crucial first few minutes. She waited a little longer. She felt she should be saying something, making polite chatter to put the girls at ease. But the girls were quiet. Quiet was something she had not expected. She had expected them to be talking among themselves, dismantling and filling up the silence. At last she counted heads—eleven in all—and said, “It looks like almost everyone is here. I’ll start to take attendance. Please correct me if I mispronounce any of your names, or if you prefer to be called by a nickname.”
    Some of the girls’ identities were not so hard to guess. Sufia Ahmed was a beautiful Somali girl wearing a hijab. Agatsuki Hamada, the only other nonwhite girl in the classroom, shyly told her that she preferred to be called Aggie. Between Chelsea and Kelsey and Sufia and Aggie, Vera had memorized four names—one-third of the class’s identity was mastered. The tall blond was Autumn Fullerton, and the tall, long-faced brunette was Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey. “Do you like to be called Cecily-Anne?” Vera asked, thinking she might prefer a diminutive, like Cee Cee—but the girl wrinkled her nose and nodded as though not only was the answer obvious but the question was distasteful, too. When Vera ticked off Louisa Garippa’s name, the girl called out, “I prefer to be called Lou.”
    “Lou,” Vera repeated, starting to make the adjustment in her roster.
    “I spell it
L-o-o
.”
    Vera looked at Loo, wondering if the girl knew she had fashioned her nickname after a British toilet. Loo had a nose ring and hair dyed a