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

least she’d looked more self-possessed, hangover and all—but she wished she had engineered a more
focused
discussion. There were so many things she had wanted to cover. She watched the students departing and observed that once again Jensen Willard seemed to be in her own little world, still working on the buckles of her knapsack when all the other girls were making their way toward the door.
    Then she raised her head, looking Vera dead in the eye. “Did you get my email?” she asked.
    “Your email? You mean from the other day?”
    “No, I sent you one last night. A new one. I sent it to your email account here.”
    It was all Vera could do not to blush. She hadn’t even figured out how to log into her new Wallace School email account yet. “I haven’t had a chance. What was the upshot of it?”
    “I sent you some pages of my journal. If you get a chance to read it early, maybe you could let me know if it is what you’re looking for, or if you want me to do them differently for Friday. I brought a hard copy, too.” Jensen handed Vera a rather substantial number of pages with a cover page on top, all clamped together with a binder clip.
    Vera, who still hadn’t become accustomed to the ways of high school overachievers, covered up her surprise quickly enough to say, “Goodness. I’m sure it’s just fine. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll try very hard to look at these pages tonight, and if I feel they need to be reworked a little, I can let you know tomorrow.”
    “Thanks.” Jensen finally managed to fasten her knapsack shut, and said, as though speaking to its buckles, “I like writing.”
    “That’s wonderful,” Vera said sincerely. “I figured you must, based on what we talked about yesterday after class.”
    “Your bookmark is nice,” Jensen said, looking Vera in the eye again. Her vacillations between indirectness and boldness had a disquieting effect . . . the eye contact that would hold fast for an instant and break away, as though the girl were sneaking little snapshots of things.
    “My bookmark? Ah—my bookmark.” Vera took out the bookmark she was using for
The Catcher in the Rye
; incongruously, its photograph featured a famous picture of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald posing at the bumper of one of their cars. Maybe Jensen had read
Gatsby
?
    “I don’t really like Fitzgerald’s writing,” Jensen said in the same tone of voice someone might say
I hate onions
. “Scott’s, I mean—I haven’t read anything by Zelda. I just think it’s interesting how he basically drank himself to death, and she burned to death in a nuthouse. That makes me kind of like them.”
    “Me, too,” Vera said. She couldn’t restrain her smile—grin, really. The grin disappeared just as quickly. She was betraying too much about her own morbid inclinations by responding with too much warmth, too much approval. She gave another one of her little nods to the girl and turned away, busying herself again. “Well,” she said, “we’ll see you tomorrow, won’t we?”
     • • • 
    That evening at home, Vera struggled to activate her Wallace School email account. She gave up after her fourth attempt and allowed herself some diversions on the Internet—cleaning out the spam in her personal email account, reading an email from her old grad school friend Elliott, and then turning to the true-crime discussion boards she sometimes lurked (but never posted) on, one of whose topic du jour was the Black Dahlia murder of 1947. A particularly rabid poster was trying to catapult the theory that Elizabeth Short, the bisected murder victim, had been slain by a big-name Hollywood executive.
Amateur stuff,
Vera thought,
and
completely
unoriginal.
Bored, she closed the browser window and then Googled her ex-fiancé, Peter, as she sometimes could not resist doing.
    There were several hits—mostly links to articles published in the
Bond Brook Gazette
, all related to Peter Mercier’s small business—and then