—
CHRISTINA FELT NUMB. She stuck a fork into the underside of her arm to see if the numbness was in her mind or her body. She felt the prongs digging into her skin. But she didn’t care.
When Henry Ammerman came to interview them at Battin, Christina told him what she’d seen. But unlike some of the other girls, animated and anxious to be heard, jumping up and down, giving the reporter details of how Madame Hoffman, the French teacher, had fainted at the window of her classroom when she saw the plane crash into the brick apartment house, and how they sat her up and fanned her face while the president of the French Club ran to see if the school nurse was still in the building, Christina remained subdued.
Mr. Durkee proudly told Henry how calm his students had been, how they’d listened to his instructions to duck and cover, scrambling under their desks and staying there until after the last of the explosions. Christina didn’t contradict him or any of the other girls.
“You know, Henry,” Mr. Durkee said, “just forty-five minutes before the crash, a thousand girls were dismissed from school. Be sure your readers think about that.”
“Good point,” Henry said. As if he hadn’t thought of that himself.
—
JANE KRASNER, in New Jersey for her roommate’s funeral, talked to Henry about Kathy Stein. Pale, brown-haired, and slender, Miss Krasner was obviously grieving, Henry wrote. “Kathy was coming home to see a boy she’d met over the holidays. She really liked him. She wanted me to come with her but it was too expensive to fly and there wasn’t enough time to take the bus. She said her father would pay for my ticket but I would never go for that. She was so generous and thoughtful…” Miss Krasner looked away. “I don’t think I can go back to that dorm room we shared. I may take the semester off. Maybe I’ll transfer to another school. Kathy was my closest friend. Sometimes it’s like that. You meet someone and you know you’re going to be best friends. You know it right away. Now she’s gone. I’ll never see her again. She was so beautiful, inside and out.”
Phonies
When Steve read about Kathy in the paper, when he read she was coming home to see a boy she’d met over the holidays, a boy she really liked, he got into bed and stayed there for four days. He thought about dying but he was afraid to do it himself. His only solace was reading The Catcher in the Rye. Holden was his friend, the one person who could understand what Steve was thinking, and the unbearable sadness he was feeling.
Finally, his mother came to his room and said, “Get up, Steve.”
“Why?”
“Because we need you to.”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
“We know you’re sad…”
“Who’s we?”
“Your family.”
Steve snorted.
“Stop this, Steve!” His mother pulled the covers off him and just as fast, he pulled them back. “Can’t you see what I’m going through?” she cried, burying her face in her hands. She turned away from him, her shoulders shaking.
What was this?
When she faced him again she was angry. “Don’t do this, Steve. And give me that book!” She reached for it, but again, he was quicker, and shoved the book under his ass where she wouldn’t dare try to get it.
“I need you to get up, shower, put on your clothes, have breakfast and go to school. I need you to do that for me.”
Who gives a fuck about what she needs?
“Do you understand, Steve?”
“I understand.” Part of him felt bad for her, his pretty little mother. But the other part knew she was a phony like all the other so-called adults in his life. Not one of them gave a shit about Kathy. She was just another dead person. Just one of the tragic twenty-three on just another crashed plane. And hardy-har, Mother dear, it wasn’t even a non-sked this time. He should tell her that—tell her how he’d traveled back from Boston in a snowstorm in a non-sked, thanks to his father. What would she say then?
Maybe he would get up. Maybe he’d get up and go to school and pretend everything was okay, just like the rest of them.
He grabbed his copy of Catcher. “I’m not finished with you, Holden,” he whispered to the book, “or you, either, Phoebe.” Fern was his Phoebe, or could be if she played it right.
At school Phil acted all glad to see him, like nothing much had happened. “Were you sick? Your mother said you couldn’t come to the phone.”
“Yeah, sick.”
“What kind of sick?”
“Just plain sick.”
“You don’t sound sick.”
“What does sick sound like?”
“Okay, I get it.”
No you don’t, Steve thought.
Coffee Cake