This year when the essay was due, one girl didn’t hand it in. Her name was Holly. She was Korean, but her parents, whom I’d met at parent–teacher night, were white. She seemed a lot like many of the second-generation Asian students I’d taught: utterly North American in her manners and attitudes; eager to fit in with all the other girls at school. Maybe too eager, at times. She wasn’t the first adopted kid I’d ever had in my class. I’m always careful to stipulate to my students that the person they choose to write about doesn’t have to be biologically related.
When I noticed she didn’t have a paper to give me, I asked that she stay after the bell. At first she pretended that she’d forgotten when the assignment was due. But when I asked her whom she’d planned to write about, she looked away uncomfortably. It took me a while to get her to open up. I knew that the whole exercise was reminding her of how inescapably different she was from her classmates, despite her attempts to blend in. Eventually, she admitted that she wanted to write about her birth mother but knew nothing about her. I said that if that’s what she wanted to do, I’d be willing to change the requirements of the essay for her. She could concentrate entirely on telling me about life in South Korea after the war, and thus—indirectly, at least—get a sense of the world in which her birth mother grew up. I gave her a couple of references that I thought she’d find useful and told her she had a month’s extension.
What she eventually handed in was practically a dissertation. The essay included accounts of children orphaned by the war and families fractured by the country’s partition, along with a description of how the country had changed in the years since then, having emerged from martial law and bloody student demonstrations to become a modern nation with an enduring sense of tradition. I gave her an A plus.
She kept doing research on her own after that. Last week, I spotted her in the library after school, browsing adoption websites, scrolling through messages from kids who were trying to locate their biological parents overseas. When she noticed me reading the screen from across the room, she quickly clicked to Amazon.com.
“Any luck?” I asked.
She was evasive to begin with. Finally, she admitted that her mom had caught her on the computer at home, then had tried to act as if it didn’t bother her. “I felt like I was cheating on her or something,” she told me.
When Holly was growing up, her parents had gone out of their way to make sure that she learned about her heritage. They’d sent her to Korean classes on the weekends, even packed her off to a special Korean culture camp one summer. But now that she was showing signs of wanting to know who her birth mother was, her parents had grown vaguely uneasy and started treating her with kid gloves.
“Stands to reason,” I said. “They’ve raised you from a baby. They don’t want to lose you.”
Holly frowned at me for not being firmly on her side. After all, I was the one who’d started her down this path. “It’s not like I’m planning to hop the next flight to Seoul, you know,” she said.
I was about to make her reflect a little more on her parents’ point of view when Abbie walked into the library. She fixed me with one of those serious looks that principals are known for. I tried to wave her off with my eyes, telegraph that now was not a good time.
“Excuse us,” she said to Holly, moving in to snatch me away.
I apologized to Holly and suggested that we pick up our discussion later. I might as well have jilted her. I could see it in her eyes. All she knew was that she’d shared her secret troubles with me, but I couldn’t be bothered to stick around and talk them through.
I followed Abbie to her office, asking her what was so important that it couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t tell me anything until she’d closed the door behind us.
“It’s Severn,” she said ominously. “The police called a few minutes ago.”
Various catastrophes flashed through my brain, all involving Severn maimed or dead.
“She’s all right, Irving,” she added quickly, reading my mind. Then: “They want to talk to you.”
There was something in Abbie’s tone that didn’t fit with the doomsday scenarios I’d painted for myself. Something almost apologetic, embarrassed on my behalf.
“What’s happened?” I asked her. I felt naked.
“She’s been caught shoplifting.”
I stood there inert.
“They didn’t want to tell me at first,” she explained, still waiting for me to react.
And then I wondered why I was so surprised. In retrospect, the pattern had been obvious, if I’d wanted to recognize it. Two days after Helen was diagnosed, Severn had got shit-faced and thrown up over one of her friends at a school dance. One month into chemo, when Helen’s bravery act began to crumble, Severn had “inadvertently” shattered the mirror in her bedroom. I’d dismissed these outbursts as temporary short-circuits, excusable at the time.
Abbie offered to step out of the office so I could use her phone in private. Just before she closed the door behind her, I thought to ask her, “Did they say where she was?”
“Imprint Books,” Abbie said.
* * *
The police cruiser was parked in front of the store when I pulled into the parking lot. Severn was sitting in the back seat, eyes downcast. A chunky boy in a baggy jacket was there with her. Avery Costello. The cop behind the wheel was filling out some paperwork, his window rolled up against the raw February wind. I stood by his door, my ears freezing, waiting for him to notice me. Shoppers passing by eyed me curiously, exchanging little smirks with one another. I tapped on the window. Finally, the cop looked up and got out of the cruiser.
“Mr. Cruickshank?” he asked. He was in his late twenties, brush cut, neck like a tree trunk. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if he’d been one of my students.
“Is this really necessary?” I said, shooting my eyes to Severn caged in the back seat.
“Shoplifting’s a crime, Mr. Cruickshank. It has consequences.”
The pedantic ass. “My daughter’s going through a rough time,” I said. “Her mother passed away last year.”
He slid his lower jaw forward as he considered my story. “You know the boy with her?”
Before Helen got sick, Severn spent all her time with other girls from school, mostly at the mall or on the phone, talking about the things that teenage girls talk about and middle-aged fathers find bone-achingly trivial: clothes, boys, makeup, hair. Back then, I had wished she’d find new friends with interests that wouldn’t turn her brain to mush. Now all her old friends had mysteriously vanished. If she wasn’t at home or in class, she was with Avery. What his appeal was I still hadn’t figured out. I glanced at his splotchy face, beefy hands. His body had grown so fast in all directions, it had surprised even him, forcing him into a stoop that, in the back seat of the police cruiser, made him look like a question mark with a gland problem. Severn had never brought him home, never introduced him to me. I’d had to gather intelligence from my confederates at their high school. He was a loner with good grades in math and sciences and a collection of Lord of the Rings artwork in his locker, they told me. Someone who grows up and walks into his dead-end, white-collar job one day with a rifle, I thought. Not anyone you’d want your daughter hanging around with.
“They go to school together,” was all I told the cop.
“The manager caught them outside the store