Caleb
Monday
Holloway was asking him a long question, the beginning of which he’d missed because he was half asleep. It ended, “She argued for equal pay and even for having women in combat, a wildly uncommon position in the late 1800s, yet she wasn’t an advocate of the vote for women. Any opinions about why that might be?”
He had rested his cheek so hard against his palm that he was sure there was a red handprint on his face now.
“Caleb?” she asked again.
“What?”
“Did you do either of the readings about Annie Oakley to prepare for Ms. McClintock’s visit?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t read the academic paper. He hadn’t even read the Wikipedia entry. And he was stuck now, entirely distracted, fixated on the name Mrs. Holloway had just pronounced clearly: McClintock.
That was the last name of the girl. The one in the halter top with the dead eyes. But she looked about fifteen or sixteen. Of course, the photo was probably five years old. She might be twenty now. A history expert at twenty-one. Well, that was pretty good.
But she was also dead, supposedly, before she would have had a chance to become an expert at anything. Maybe Vorst had just said that, because he’d cut her off. Disowned her. He seemed the type of guy to do that, just as he’d suddenly gone cold on Caleb—thank God—after the summer.
Holloway came around the front of the desk and leaned against it, refusing to move on and pester another student. “The second reading I assigned referred to Oakley’s ‘subtle subversion.’ She was a conservative lady in the Victorian era, in terms of her outward appearance, but also an iconoclast. Other examples of this, Caleb?”
“Sorry, what’s an iconoclast?”
Everyone was staring at him now, enjoying the stalemate.
“An icon smasher, a skeptic,” Holloway explained and then, sympathetic to his confusion or else wanting to make his idiocy clear to everyone watching. “She was a rebel, Caleb.”
She was a rebel.
That was what the halter-top girl had written in her one-page college application essay, in reference to the woman she admired. Both of the women, actually. And it made sense that she was now a history expert and that she had broken off things with her creepy dad because she, too, wanted to be a rebel.
Holloway said, “Tell me one thing you know about Annie Oakley or you get a zero for the day.”
Caleb crossed his ankles under the desk and pushed back his bangs, searching his memory for details from the essay. “Okay, so people think she gave in and lost the shooting match to the guy she married later, but that’s only in the movie version. In real life, she didn’t throw the match at all. She didn’t lose on purpose to anyone, ever.”
Holloway sat back on the edge of her desk. “All right. So, you read a little . . .”
“Oh, and some people thought her brother taught her to shoot, but in later interviews he said that wasn’t true. She taught herself. Even her brother didn’t know why people added that lie, but I think it’s because no one could imagine a super-young girl would be so talented and such . . . an iconoclast, I guess.”
Holloway laughed. He’d never heard his teacher laugh before. “I didn’t know she had a brother, and none of that was in the assigned readings, but that’s great, Caleb. Thank you for participating.”
His heart was beating fast. Holloway moved on to somebody else. Everyone was still staring at Caleb, but he didn’t give a shit. He was in his own head, going over what he’d just found out. The McClintock girl in the photo who had supplied him with those details was alive. Vorst’s daughter or not-daughter was alive.
He felt like he’d gotten incredible news about some celebrity who’d disappeared years ago and had suddenly resurfaced. No, that was stupid. She was a real person, someone who used to live—maybe still lived—right in this town. It was more like he’d just found out a friend hadn’t died.
Caleb thought of the essay again, and its writer. The girl had started out talking about Annie Oakley and all the things that made her unique, special and tough. But then by the end she was talking about her sister, because it was her sister who knew the most about Annie and talked about her all the time. And then the girl did the bait and switch that you probably always had to do in college essays, where you seemed to be talking about something from a book and then ended up talking about something from your life, and you got soft, you tried to make the reader cry, because if he or she did, you’d probably get a scholarship.
The woman I most admire who isn’t famous or long dead is my sister. We don’t always get along, and I used to be mad at her for moving out of state. But now I realize there are two ways to get back at your enemies. You challenge them in a shootout or you flee. The fleeing makes sense, especially if you go someplace where you’ll have a good life. Success is the best revenge, right? And even if you have future battles, you have to heal first, gather up your strength.
Annie Oakley got away. My sister got away. She’s in graduate school now. Our mother doesn’t think I’ll get into college. She wants me to work and live at home next year because she thinks I’ll just waste our money and the experience. But that’s not my plan. Even if I don’t go to college, I’ll still move away from here.
Everyone was standing up, sliding textbooks into their backpacks. The girl in front of Caleb pushed a handout in his face. “Hello?”
He hadn’t heard the announcement.
“What do we have to do?”
The girl shook her head—pathetic—but she was smiling. “Answer these discussion questions and come up with a new question for Ruth McClintock when she comes next week. She rescheduled, so now we have to do more work.”
“Ruth McClintock?”
“The author,” the girl said, “The historian who’s coming.” Under her breath she whispered, “And the teacher knows you’re high, asshole.”
“I’m not.”
Ruth McClintock.
He felt like he’d lost something. Kennidy—that was the name on the essay—might not be alive after all. Okay. Easy come, easy go.
But for some reason, it wasn’t. He walked out of the class and didn’t make it to the next, just went to the bathroom and stayed there as it filled with people and emptied again. He sat in a closed stall and hoped no one would look for him while he let the news sink in. He set his elbows on his knees and pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes.
She hadn’t gotten away.
Caleb didn’t know why he’d spent all this time half-believing she was Vorst’s daughter. She wasn’t his daughter. There were no snapshots on the fridge, no framed pictures of her on the walls, only framed yellow newspaper clippings of Vorst himself at track meets and football championships. What kind of father hung up pictures of himself and hid his daughter’s in a drawer? She was something else to him, for a longer time than those other kids maybe, and that was creepiest of all. Why that box contained no naked shots he didn’t know, but he knew there had been naked pictures. Vorst always took pictures. Maybe she—like Caleb—had made an effort to find and destroy them. That was another way they were alike. They wanted no reminders of the shitty times. And if that were true, he should honor her by getting rid of the other things he’d found, like her notebook and all the crap stuffed inside it, including her essay.
But it might have been the last thing she’d ever written, the last thought she’d tried to share with anyone. Was it okay to erase that?
Kennidy hadn’t made it and had probably known she wasn’t going to make it, not to college or anywhere good. Words were cheap, and words in assigned essays were the cheapest. She was saying shit people wanted to read, though he knew she’d loved her sister. That part was real. She’d loved her sister and had known she was disappointing her and had known she’d never get away. If you had all the pieces, the essay and the photo and the smell of licorice candy in your nostrils and the memory of Tang and cheap vodka still burning in your brain, you could tell.