The girl waited a second. Then: “Kinda.”
Kinda. The word had been spoken barely above a whisper, and yet it seemed to echo in the classroom with Matterhorn grandeur. Kinda. Kristin didn’t believe she looked upset; she was despairing inside—she was shamed inside, she was smoldering inside, she was confused inside—but she thought she was keeping it together as far as the world was concerned. As far as a bunch of ostensibly self-absorbed adolescents could tell. She found herself starting to tremble at the very notion that Caroline’s parents saw in the death of two men and her husband’s emotional—if not actual—infidelity only the possibility that their precious child’s AP score might fall from a five to a four.
“Well, Caroline,” she began, trying (and failing) to maintain eye contact with the sixteen-year-old, “if you don’t want to answer my question about the Compromise of 1850, how about taking a stab at this one: How do I look kinda upset? Any specifics?”
The girl and her best friend, Ayelet, exchanged glances. They were on the verge of rolling their eyes. “One specific?” she continued.
Caroline sighed, a magisterial teenage exhalation of exasperation. “Um, this,” she said, and Kristin saw some of the boys—even Reed, usually so diligent, so quiet—struggling to suppress smiles.
“This?”
“I guess. I mean, I was just asking if you were upset, and you’re kind of…interrogating me.”
“I’m not interrogating you.”
“Okay. Fine. You’re not.”
Kristin wanted to cry. How many times in the past forty-eight hours had she looked at herself in mirrors at her mother’s and seen her eyes so red, so puffy that she thought she had looked vampiric? Three? Four? More? It seemed that she had always been crying or on the verge of crying. And when she wasn’t, usually it was because she had been seething. But she thought she was keeping it together now. She had avoided the teachers’ lounge before school this morning precisely so she would not have to discuss this nightmare with any of her peers and risk breaking down.
Okay. Fine. You’re not. She heard the words again in her mind and understood that she had to wipe at her eyes. It wasn’t merely that she could feel them growing moist; it was also a feverish, OCD-like compulsion. But if she did, there was the danger that she would be opening the dam and she would be reduced to sobs in front of her class. She took a breath and sat on her hands.
“Caroline,” she began, unsure what she was going to say. “Yes. This was an awful couple of days. It seriously…sucked.” She paused, surprised at her candor and her choice of words. She wasn’t trying to talk down to her class; rather, she wondered if she had instinctively reached out to them. “I’m sorry. But the last forty-eight or fifty or whatever hours? The worst of my life. Yup, worse than the death of my father—who I loved a lot. You just never expect to be awakened to the news that there are two dead men in your house. Criminals, yes. People you’ve never met, sure. But still: a double murder. In your home. And you’ve probably heard the rest of the story: my brother-in-law’s bachelor party got a little…crazy. I guess you all know that.”
She wondered if she sounded a little crazy herself, but it no longer mattered. She released her hands from beneath her hips and wiped at her eyes. At her cheeks. Because now the tears had been set free, a glacier melting in May, the channels at the edge of her nose brimming with sadness.
“And you know what, Caroline? Your dad was right. That craziness is an elephant in the room. I’m glad you brought it up.” She forced a smile. “I am kind of a mess. But you know what else? My family will get past this and I will get past this. I’ll make sure you all kill it when AP testing time comes. I’ll be fine and you’ll be fine. I mean that.”
Caroline nodded. Ayelet stood up, and for a second Kristin feared the girl was going to embrace her. She was afraid that was the extent of her collapse: she needed comfort from the teen girls in her class. In her care. The students had never seen anything like this, and she wondered if she was going to have to rewrite the books on adolescent psychiatry and child development: these kids were empathetic. They were actually worried about her.
Fortunately, however, the girl simply handed her a tissue.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Welcome.”