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

before English class, we had an assembly in the auditorium. Were you there? I looked for you.
    Vera stopped reading and pushed the paper away an inch, like someone who has resolved to not take another bite from her plate. This direct address took her off guard. But curiosity got the better of her; she pulled the paper closer to her again and continued reading.
    I know our class talked about themes in The Catcher in the Rye. One of the themes is artifice vs. reality—the real vs. the phony—and I mention this because school assemblies are exercises in artifice. I kind of wish one of Holden’s cronies had been there to let out a colossal fart during the proceedings, just to keep things real.
    FACT: Getting a bunch of girls together in an auditorium is offensive to the senses. The whole room reeked of Coco Mademoiselle perfume—the fragrance most of the girls here wear. Same fragrance their mothers wear, come to think of it. Little miniatures of their parents these kids are. You can look at them now and see what they’ll be like in ten years, in twenty years. They’ll be exactly the same, except with more money and more bloat. They’ll take positions in local government and build tennis courts in their backyards and complain about neighbors with unsightly, unmowed lawns.
    It’s the same way with the poor white kids on other side of the river, identifiable by their scruffy pseudo hip-hop clothes and baggy pants. Their futures are just as clearly mapped out, but unlike the rich kids, sometimes I think they know how depressing this is. They take Vocational and General and Remedial classes and, whether they make it out of high school or not, will soon crank out litters of sad, doomed, government-funded children—just what we need more of. I know of which I speak, because I’m a poor white kid, too. I live on that side of the river and used to go to their school up until last year. I’m a “scholarship kid” now. Aren’t I the special one.
    I’m not doing a very good job of setting the scene for the morning assembly, am I? I get distracted easily. I guess I could tell you how the dean of our school, Mr. Harold Finister, was up onstage doing his usual pointless shtick, handing out some leftover awards that he didn’t get around to handing out earlier in the year. If it seems as though I have some bitterness toward Dean Finister, then you are reading this the right way. Earlier this year, thanks to Finister, I had to meet with this shrink and almost ended up in a hospital. This is not the kind of thing I can easily forgive.
    Finister’s big thing is keeping an eye out for girls who have alcoholic parents or are using substances themselves; he’s always checking our eyes for signs of drug-induced pupil enlargement. He can’t rag on me for substance abuse, so his thing with me is harping on depression. Every time he sees me he says, “You look sad today, Jensen.” Every frigging time without fail. It’s my own fault, though, because a couple of months ago he found me crying in the corridor, leaning against the wall because I thought I might collapse from crying so hard. I go on crying jags a lot, especially lately, and once I start I can’t stop. He hauled me into his office because I guess it’s bad if a girl sees another girl bawling unreservedly in the halls; it’s either an eyesore or it’s bad for morale, I’m not sure which. I sat there in the chair across from him and couldn’t stop crying, and finally he handed me a Kleenex. “You’re makeup’s getting all smudged,” he said. That was all he said at the time.
    Later he called my parents and told them he was referring me to this shrink who charges on a sliding scale. I think this made my mother sad and worried, thinking I needed therapy, and I felt awful about that. I felt even worse when I met the shrink—a woman named Dr. Haskell who has some kind of weird mental defect that makes her incapable of saying anything other than “Uh-huh.” I’m not