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

something new, an engagement announcement from that same publication. There was no photo, but the announcement described his betrothal to a florist named Betsy Gillingwater. A second Google hit led her to a wedding registry, presumably set up by the fiancée; she couldn’t imagine Peter bothering with something so fussy. Feeling like a consummate stalker, Vera looked at the items Betsy wanted for the marital home—percale sheets, Ralph Lauren towels, and all manner of cookware, including such extras as garlic presses and lemon zesters and something called ramekins, whatever those were.
So she’s a domestic type—a cook,
Vera thought.
Peter must be loving this.
The one time Peter had made the mistake of asking Vera to bake something for his company potluck, she had had to run out and buy a disposable tinfoil pan at the dollar store.
Well, more power to you, Betsy. More power to both of you.
    There had been a time when the thought of Peter with any woman who wasn’t her would have driven her into a rage that knew no bounds—the sort of obsessive rage that would cause her to fixate on poor Betsy, to imagine terrible things befalling the hapless woman—but now she felt almost nothing.
You’re getting soft in your old age, girl,
she told herself.
    She closed her laptop and got up to pour a herself a generous glass of wine—the cheapest, most vinegary wine she had been able to find in the corner bodega—and, thus fortified, started digging around in her wheeled suitcase until she produced the folder for her morning class; email or no email, she could give the hard copy of Jensen Willard’s journal a look. She lay down on her bed on her side, glass of wine resting on the floor next to her—would students be appalled to know that teachers read their writing in bed sometimes?—and began to read. Her eyebrow lifted as she saw the title on the cover page for the first time. It was as though the girl had foreseen the subject of that day’s lecture—though, she supposed, it wouldn’t take the Amazing Kreskin to predict the direction Vera had taken.
    That David Copperfield Kind of Crap: Journal Entry #1, by Jensen Willard
    I have to admit, I’m a little confused. Do you want to know about me in this journal or do you want to know about Holden Caulfield? Or do you want to know about me in relation to Holden? (Now I’m doing what you do—asking questions.) I’ll start with me, I guess, and move on to Holden as needed, or at your say-so.
    With every journal I write I feel the need to reintroduce myself in case the previous journal gets lost and leaves the reader with no backstory—no David Copperfield kind of crap—whatsoever. After all, I’m no Anne Frank. I haven’t got an Otto Frank in my life to recover my journal from the enemy and share my story with the world. Not that I’m comparing myself to Anne Frank in any way . . . well, I guess I just did, but I know it’s not a good comparison. A comparison like that could piss a lot of people off.
    My name is Jensen Willard. My namesake aunt is dead now, from a brain tumor. She already had the brain tumor when my mom got pregnant with me, so my mom got to feeling noble and promised her dying sister that she’d name her unborn child after her in some way, shape, or form. But my mom didn’t have an ultrasound—she was so convinced she was going to have a boy. After I was born, and after my mother inspected my body, searching in vain for a penis, imagine how screwed she must have felt. She didn’t like her sister’s first name, Nora. I don’t know why. To me, Nora is the name of a girl in an English or Irish novel who has roses in her cheeks and gets the shock of her life when she leaves the provincial lands and is taken advantage of by a cad. (I like that kind of story. Does that surprise you?) Jensen, my aunt’s married name, now used as a first name, calls to mind a pretentious, twerpy guy with a pipe in his mouth. Maybe a butler.
    I am fifteen years old—I