after Annabel has stopped wanting to associate with me.
When I was about nine years old, I had an epiphany. I was sitting on the embankment of my elementary school playground—alone, like always, because Annabel went to the Catholic school—and a thought occurred to me (or maybe more a premonition than a thought): Life is never going to be better than it is now. After this, it’ll just be one disappointment after another. Like I’ve been trying to say, if something is true, I can feel how true it is. So that’s something that’s changed me. Once you know something’s never going to get any better, you never have to waste energy on false hopes again. It’s kind of freeing, really.
And you wonder why a cheery soul like me doesn’t have any friends. Well, except maybe for one, if a boyfriend counts as a friend; I do have a boyfriend, sort of. A little later on I suppose I’ll have to tell you how I ended up with one of those.
It feels like I’m just getting warmed up—I swear you will be sorry you assigned me this journal—but I am being called down for dinner. It’s meat loaf, which means it’s going to be another bowl-of-cereal night for me. This journal entry ends on an anticlimax. This reminds me of something—having read all of Catcher (see, I do the shorthand, too), I have to ask if Holden’s mother ever cooked him meat loaf? Maybe that was part of Holden’s problem, not having a mother who made meat loaf and offered the standby option of a bowl of cereal. Just some food for thought, if you can excuse the bad pun. And P.S., I don’t think The Catcher in the Rye is all that great of a book, to be honest, but I know you have to teach it. I like The Bell Jar better.
Her arm completely asleep from resting her weight on it, Vera turned the last page of the journal as though expecting more, then looked again at the cover page. She was impressed with what she had just read. She thought,
I must warn her about discussing other students in her journal entries.
Then she thought:
Who am I kidding?
She found the observations too engrossing and too informative to censor. Vera already found herself recognizing the lens through which Jensen Willard saw the world.
Chapter Three
Around four o’clock every morning, when the last of Dorset’s barflies had simmered down and the farmers were not yet awake, Vera often found herself driven out of bed in an attenuated state of alertness. She liked having this small window available to her just before dawn, when the hour was hers and hers alone to claim, and she frequently used this time for writing and researching. On this particular morning she was reading some of her files and transcripts relating to Ivan Schlosser, reviewing his confession of the murder of Heidi Duplessis, the high school girl from Bond Brook.
Why would someone deliver a voluntary confession?
was the question Vera had written at the top of her notebook page. Was there some kind of reward involved, real or imagined, in owning up to a crime that hadn’t been traced to him? Had Schlosser simply wanted to boast—to take credit for every one of his misdeeds? Looking over the transcripts of his interviews with Detective Leo Vachon, Vera could see no hint of remorse.
SCHLOSSER: I didn’t know I was going to stab her until my knife was at her throat [LAUGHTER], but once I started I knew it was the right thing to do. Didn’t expect her to scratch up my arms like she did, though. She was a solid little thing. Big boobs, big shoulders. It took a few minutes before she went still. Then I took her into the bathtub and cut her up . . .
VACHON: What did you cut her up with?
SCHLOSSER: A tree saw.
VACHON: This was a tree saw you already had or one that you bought?
SCHLOSSER: It was one that was in the basement of my apartment. I think maybe it was the landlord’s. I never saw nobody use it. I know I never cut up a tree in my damn life. Just people.
Vera kept turning pages of the transcript, dropping
When I was about nine years old, I had an epiphany. I was sitting on the embankment of my elementary school playground—alone, like always, because Annabel went to the Catholic school—and a thought occurred to me (or maybe more a premonition than a thought): Life is never going to be better than it is now. After this, it’ll just be one disappointment after another. Like I’ve been trying to say, if something is true, I can feel how true it is. So that’s something that’s changed me. Once you know something’s never going to get any better, you never have to waste energy on false hopes again. It’s kind of freeing, really.
And you wonder why a cheery soul like me doesn’t have any friends. Well, except maybe for one, if a boyfriend counts as a friend; I do have a boyfriend, sort of. A little later on I suppose I’ll have to tell you how I ended up with one of those.
It feels like I’m just getting warmed up—I swear you will be sorry you assigned me this journal—but I am being called down for dinner. It’s meat loaf, which means it’s going to be another bowl-of-cereal night for me. This journal entry ends on an anticlimax. This reminds me of something—having read all of Catcher (see, I do the shorthand, too), I have to ask if Holden’s mother ever cooked him meat loaf? Maybe that was part of Holden’s problem, not having a mother who made meat loaf and offered the standby option of a bowl of cereal. Just some food for thought, if you can excuse the bad pun. And P.S., I don’t think The Catcher in the Rye is all that great of a book, to be honest, but I know you have to teach it. I like The Bell Jar better.
Her arm completely asleep from resting her weight on it, Vera turned the last page of the journal as though expecting more, then looked again at the cover page. She was impressed with what she had just read. She thought,
I must warn her about discussing other students in her journal entries.
Then she thought:
Who am I kidding?
She found the observations too engrossing and too informative to censor. Vera already found herself recognizing the lens through which Jensen Willard saw the world.
Chapter Three
Around four o’clock every morning, when the last of Dorset’s barflies had simmered down and the farmers were not yet awake, Vera often found herself driven out of bed in an attenuated state of alertness. She liked having this small window available to her just before dawn, when the hour was hers and hers alone to claim, and she frequently used this time for writing and researching. On this particular morning she was reading some of her files and transcripts relating to Ivan Schlosser, reviewing his confession of the murder of Heidi Duplessis, the high school girl from Bond Brook.
Why would someone deliver a voluntary confession?
was the question Vera had written at the top of her notebook page. Was there some kind of reward involved, real or imagined, in owning up to a crime that hadn’t been traced to him? Had Schlosser simply wanted to boast—to take credit for every one of his misdeeds? Looking over the transcripts of his interviews with Detective Leo Vachon, Vera could see no hint of remorse.
SCHLOSSER: I didn’t know I was going to stab her until my knife was at her throat [LAUGHTER], but once I started I knew it was the right thing to do. Didn’t expect her to scratch up my arms like she did, though. She was a solid little thing. Big boobs, big shoulders. It took a few minutes before she went still. Then I took her into the bathtub and cut her up . . .
VACHON: What did you cut her up with?
SCHLOSSER: A tree saw.
VACHON: This was a tree saw you already had or one that you bought?
SCHLOSSER: It was one that was in the basement of my apartment. I think maybe it was the landlord’s. I never saw nobody use it. I know I never cut up a tree in my damn life. Just people.
Vera kept turning pages of the transcript, dropping
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