Free What Has Become of You by Jan Elizabeth Watson

class 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 passed 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 analysis.”
    “If you can work in a bit more analysis, 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.”
    “When the quality of the writing is as interesting as yours, I don’t mind at all. There’s just one thing I’d like to caution you about.”
    A look crossed Jensen’s features, and Vera did not know how to translate it at first. Was it recognition—the look of one who had known that, sooner rather than later, the other shoe would drop?
    “It’s nothing bad,” Vera said hurriedly. “I’d just like to ask you to be careful when writing about your classmates. And I’m not saying this for the reason you might think. It’s not because I’m trying to
censor
your right to discuss your fellow classmates in your journals.”
    “But you’d rather I wrote nicer things about them.”
    “No, not even that. I’m just concerned that someone might get a hold of your journals and . . . use them against you. You see, this happened to me once, back when I was in high school and had a tendency to write down every little thing that I thought. A notebook got stolen out of my bag in homeroom. I got in a lot of trouble for some of the things I wrote. I’d hate for . . . I’d hate for such a thing to happen to you. That’s all.”
    They sized each other up for a second or two. Vera searched for a way to shift the conversation to Jensen—perhaps something specific about the journals she’d read, something to demonstrably show Jensen that she’d read it and
gotten
it. She blurted out, “I liked that bit you wrote a couple of weeks ago about Holden’s mother not making meat loaf.”
    Jensen grimaced. “That was kind of a throwaway. I had to end the journal entry somehow.”
    “Well, it amused me. And it certainly brings to mind the class issues in the novel. Holden is well-to-do, by most people’s standards. I’ll tell you a funny little personal story. One time when I was in a graduate school seminar, I made a passing reference