Free What Has Become of You by Jan Elizabeth Watson Page A

to how much I’d enjoyed eating TV dinners when I was a kid—are they even called TV dinners anymore?—and my classmates, some of who were trust fund kids, were all agog. One girl said, ‘Vera,
really
? You used to eat TV
dinners
?’ They couldn’t conceive of it.”
    Jensen’s mouth moved a little—not a grimace this time but not exactly a smile, either. Vera had the distinct feeling that the girl thought she was being silly but was too polite to say so. “I think you’ll like my new journal entry then. I actually wrote about . . . um, the haves and the have-nots, I guess you could say.“
    “Sounds promising,” Vera said. “Very good, then. I’ll see you tomorrow in class, yes?”
    “You will,” Jensen said. But now she seemed to have forgotten that she’d been on her way out the door. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and said, “I don’t think you did anything wrong, by the way.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “With what you said in class. If anything, you might have even copped out a little. Don’t worry about what Sufia thinks.”
    “I appreciate you backing me up on this,” Vera said, “but I respect what all of my students think and feel. I know that I
try
to, anyway.”
    After Jensen was gone, Vera put her journal on top of the unread freewrites. As she was sorting the rest of them, trying to take her mind off all that had occurred after her last class, Sue MacMasters, the head of the English department, walked past her classroom, did a double take, and stuck her head in the door.
    “Why, hello, stranger,” she said, her words curling around Vera in a way that felt like an accusation. “How is everything going? I haven’t heard much from you, so I assume you haven’t had any questions.”
    “I think things are going well. We’re already discussing
Catcher
. The students seem to tolerate me all right.”
    “I’m sure they tolerate you. They have ways of letting you know if they don’t. I’m on my way to a conference with a parent, but please—don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything. I know filling in for someone else can be rather overwhelming at first. I was just saying the other day that I’ve yet to see you come into the faculty lounge. You’re a bit of a mystery among the teachers.”
    “Well,” Vera said wryly, “it’s good to know I have some mystique.”
    She was grateful that Sue couldn’t linger. The brief attention from her boss had made her more self-conscious than ever. She knew she would have to buck up and start mingling with the other faculty at some point if she wanted any hope of having her contract renewed in the fall. But she was starting to feel, already, that forming close bonds with the faculty would somehow be traitorous to her students. Her first loyalty was to them. The side she was on would most likely always be theirs.
    She returned her attention to the freewrites stacked before her. There was an hour-and-a-half gap between her first and second class—plenty of time to read and comment on some of these. One student, Chelsea Cutler—not the brightest bulb in the class, Vera had quickly ascertained—wrote about how the theme of
The Catcher in the Rye
is “the 1950s, where people talked different and thought different, which shows how no one can relate to them anymore.” Another student, Katherine Arsenault—Vera noticed she had signed her name
Kitty
—had written, “Holden is someone who takes everything for granite. I think this book is about not taking things for granite.” Applying a quasi-feminist analysis, Harmony Phelps wrote, “This is about how guys objectify women and tell lies and try to say they’re something that they’re not. Men cannot help it.”
    Enough, Vera thought. She would have to get to these later. She pulled out Jensen’s journal entry. As with the girl’s first submission, the title on the cover gave her a little jolt.
    I Shoot People in This Hat: Journal Entry #2, by Jensen Willard
    Yesterday morning,