Conversion (35 page)

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2012

A
fter 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 cell. 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 table. 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.

“Oh, hey, Colleen. How’s it going?”

“Hi, Mark. Sorry to just drop in on you guys like this,” I said, shuffling my feet on the stoop.

“No problem. Come on in.”

I struggled to think of a worthy conversational gambit. I never really knew what to say to Emma’s brother.

“So,” I ventured. “How’s Endicott?”

“Awesome. It’s gonna be great, having Em there next year. You’ll have to come up. They’ve got their own beach, you know that?”

“No kidding? That’s awesome.”

He grinned crookedly at me and nodded. “Yeah. She’s upstairs. You know the way.”

I did know the way. I climbed up the stairs, my feet fitting into the worn patches on the carpet, comfortable and familiar. I heard voices downstairs in the kitchen, the sounds of dinner under way. Life stirred in Emma’s house.

“Em?” I whispered, nudging her bedroom door open with my knuckle.

She was at her desk doing something on her laptop. When she saw me, her eyes lit up.

“Colleen!” she cried, leaping to her feet. Before I knew it, she’d wrapped her arms around my neck. I glanced over at the computer screen, but she’d closed whatever she was working on. “I’m so glad to see you. Did you drive?”

“Nah. I walked. I was down at Front Street with Deena and them.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, crawling onto her twin bed and making room for me at the foot. She pulled her old American Girl doll into her lap and toyed with its Puritan hat. It smiled its glassy eyes at me, and I settled in against a pillow.

“I’ve been so tired this break. It’s crazy. I’ve been sleeping for days,” she said, peeking at me over the doll’s head.

“Me too,” I sighed. “They told me the drugs would do that, but I think I was just really stressed out.” We stared at each other, smiling tentative smiles, wondering who was going to bring up Salem Willows first.

“So,” I began.

She looked at her lap. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she whispered. “About Tad.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said in a rush. “It was my fault. I was so . . . I don’t know. Wrapped up in stuff. I should’ve—”

“No,” Emma cut me off, her pale eyes shining in the warm light of her bedroom. “It’s my fault. I wanted to tell you, I really did. But, I don’t know. I was embarrassed. I told Anjali, ’cause I knew she wouldn’t judge me. But I was afraid of what you’d think.”