Free The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

to sleep, waiting to be burned alive. She awoke wet. It had rained. Around her, the trees sizzled. The man with the lighter sat on a charred stump, smoking a cigarette.
     
      
     
    Ms. Wilkes, her ninth-grade English teacher, had noted in red felt pen, “Such imagination! but not really the assignment” in the margin, and given Mary a B.
    Mary put “Ida and the Arsonist” in MISC . JUNK ; it did nothing to help explain the receipt, and was embarrassing besides, a bit of self-satisfied youthfulness best relegated to the dung heap. She turned decorator’s estimates upside down. Two envelopes dropped out, each embossed with a Semmering Academy shield, one perceptibly older than the other. She withdrew the letter from the older envelope first, noting the typed name below the signature. Ms. Nadia Wilkes . Ms. Wilkes, as academy protocol dictated, had written to Mary’s mother on October 23, 1985, to inform her that Mary was currently failing fall semester English due to the following two reasons: 1) Mary refused to complete assignments properly (see as evidence Mary’s enclosed “critical response” to Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ); 2) Mary had missed all but one of her deadlines for her fall English project, a letter-writing crusade “enacted on behalf of an unjustly accused or mistreated woman.”
    The wronged-woman project, Ms. Wilkes wrote, was Semmering Academy’s most enduring rite of academic passage. Just last year a student’s letter-writing campaign on behalf of a wrongly imprisoned babysitter had resulted in a reopening of the case. The point, Ms. Wilkes clarified, was not to make the news, the point was to “rescue” somebody with whom the student felt a deep personal connection, the idea being that the student “will discover within herself a wronged woman whom she herself has the power to exonerate.” One African American student had chosen a slave girl from Georgia and written letters to the local elementary school, urging them to start a commemorative day in the slave girl’s name; a girl whose father died before she was born wrote letters to Jason and his father, King Aeson, explaining Medea’s actions and begging for a greater cultural understanding of the pressures endured by single mothers; some students had chosen, as had Mary’s sister Regina, a family relative such as Abigail Lake, a woman accused of witchcraft and hanged.
    Mary, however, had made a mockery of the assignment. She had chosen as her wronged woman Dora, Freud’s famous patient. This was fine with Ms. Wilkes. What wasn’t fine with Ms. Wilkes was that Mary, when asked to give an oral presentation on her subject, gave her oral presentation not on Dora but on Bettina Spencer (Semmering ’74), a disturbed former student who had faked her disappearance, testified in court that she’d been abducted and sexually abused by Semmering’s then field hockey coach, and burned down the Semmering Founder’s Library. Ms. Wilkes, worried that Dora had mutated into a fraught topic for Mary, reassigned her to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But Mary had failed to write her essay describing her personal attachment to Gilman. She had failed to submit her letter-writing campaign strategy, and the result she hoped her campaign would achieve. The project, due November 7, in two weeks’ time, constituted 75 percent of her fall term grade.
    “Unless unforeseen circumstances arise,” Ms. Wilkes concluded, “I am afraid that I will have to give Mary a failing grade for junior fall English.”
    Mary folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. She couldn’t help but mildly gloat that Ms. Wilkes had been forced, due to “unforeseen circumstances,” to give her an incomplete.
    She withdrew the second, visibly newer letter postmarked four months ago, the address written in someone’s nearly illegible hand.
     
      
     
I’ve found something that might be of interest to you.
     
      
     
    Skuz Bod
     
      
     
    Mary