The Gifted Class by Mary Morris

It happened during the sweltering summer that they lived out of town, the summer of the white Ford station wagon’s inevitable demise. The Ford had lasted them for two years, despite having been purchased by Caroline’s mother for a mere $200 in a moment of pure no-other-vehicle-in-sight desperation. However, during that hottest part of that miserable summer, it was breaking down two or three times a week, always at a different point in the ten miles between Trenton, Illinois, and their decrepit, rented country house, which had a thousand leaks and always smelled of wood smoke and bacon grease. Caroline hated that house. She hated that car. She hated that her dad still hadn’t called her after leaving them the winter before. But most of all, she hated the way her mother responded to any of her complaints with stoic, flat-mouthed silence.

The only thing Caroline didn’t hate that summer was the Renaissance Program at Trenton Community College, home of the Blue Knights. It was for gifted students, or Mrs. Mitchell told Caroline’s mother at her final eighth-grade parent-teacher conference, and Mrs. Mitchell thought Caroline might enjoy the playwriting class. 

Gifted. Caroline liked the sound of it then, but in the years to follow she would come to depend on that word as a personal definition. Mrs. Mitchell’s pronouncement was the first time she had heard it in connection with herself, and once she latched onto the sound and the feel of it, her fate was decided: Caroline had to be in that class, and this was what she told her mother. And Brenda Campbell, although visibly irritated at the idea of driving into Trenton every Saturday afternoon of the summer, agreed with a sigh and a rare, untwisted smile. “I knew all that reading had to be good for something,” she said, approval leaking out around the grudging words.

The day of the breakdown was the fourth Saturday of what Brenda called Caroline’s “gifted class.” During that month of Saturdays, Caroline had found a new religion, and her combined priest and god was Mr. Harris, who had a master’s degree in literature and a true and abiding love for the scripted scene. He wasn’t young or good-looking—his hair stuck out a bit around the bald patch spreading from back to front on top, and he had a tendency to sweat through the armpits of his short-sleeved button-down shirts when he got really excited about an idea—but his enthusiasm and genuine interest in helping his earnest young group of overachievers learn to love plays was a revelation. He read aloud to them, citing names like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller before sweeping his hand up like an elegant traffic cop and stating, “We begin …” 

And when he read the dialogue, which was always for people older than his students who’d lived in a time they couldn’t truly visualize, he became the characters. Some of Caroline’s classmates might snicker at the occasional bad word or reference to sex, but she watched in rapt silence and later asked to borrow his playbooks. After much begging, she was allowed to take home The Crucible, which was about Puritans, he said, so her parents wouldn’t think it too racy. Caroline didn’t know what “racy” meant, but she secretly hoped the play would end up being it. Caroline liked the courtroom stuff in the third act and the way John Proctor died rather than ruin his family by confessing, but she suspected that wasn’t the racy part. 

Mr. Harris wanted the class to write a one-act play together before the end of the summer, only four weeks away, so the last two classes had been brainstorming sessions. The Campbells had gone a full two weeks without a hitch in the giddy-up of the white station wagon, and in the meantime Caroline had found heretofore-unknown creative power in writing scene after scene for the class’s character, Yolanda, in the black-and-white composition book her mother had bought her from the college bookstore on the first day of class.

As the official character decided upon by the other kids in the class, none of whom Caroline recognized from her school, Yolanda was frustratingly vague. Caroline’s gifted classmates had dealt up what she considered to be a fairly boring fifteen-year-old girl who babysat and didn’t like school; the only remotely cool thing about her was her name, which Caroline had suggested. 

Mr. Harris said that conflict is the heart of drama, so the class had to give Yolanda some problems: “Make her interesting!” he told them. In her notebook, Caroline tried different things—parental abuse, a traumatizing dog attack, leukemia—and then decided to keep them all in the story, just in case one wasn’t enough. 

Things quickly escalated beyond the one act Mr. Harris had suggested when Caroline gave Yolanda a little sister, Francine, only to kill Francine off fairly early in the tale. Yolanda’s sweet but troubled boyfriend, who was extremely handsome and about to graduate high school, ran over Francine accidentally while high on marijuana and then, in the days that followed, refused to allow Yolanda to forgive him even as her vengeful family fell apart. They were planning a horrible fate for the boyfriend, who didn’t have a name yet because nothing felt quite right. Caroline tried calling him Tristan, but kept forgetting it, and then Jake, after which she kept slipping and using Tristan again. After that, he was simply “the boyfriend” until something else better came along; she was tired of constantly crossing things out.  

Yolanda’s father, also currently unnamed, was a geometry teacher and a loving but weak and doomed alcoholic, while her mother came to life as a vicious stay-at-home bulimic who wore too much red lipstick and didn’t even cry at her younger daughter’s funeral in Act IV. Her name was Veronica, which sounded appropriately bitchy to Caroline; she didn’t read Archie comics, but she paid attention to what she’d seen depicted on the covers propped up on the supermarket shelves. 

All this was working into some interesting dramatic territory, but Caroline was working on adding some jokes to lighten the tone (“Comic relief,” Mr. Harris said, “is crucial to sell the audience on the tragedy”) between the funeral and a weepy phone conversation between Yolanda and her long-lost older brother, a famous actor living in Los Angeles who was on the verge of adopting her, likely in Act VII, to save her from the very parents he’d escaped years before.  

Writing her play took up all her time. Caroline’s mother had begun to make disparaging comments about getting her head out of her notebook. Her little sister Abby had taken alternating tactics to get Abby’s attention: either whining for Caroline to play with her or loudly playing on her own nearby. Caroline couldn’t be bothered too much with all of this. The play was the thing, as she loftily told her mother one night. 

“Your ass is going to be the thing if you don’t put that damn notebook down and play with your sister for once,” Brenda fired back. Caroline glared but subsided, taking precious time away from Yolanda to give voice to Abby’s Kumiko Barbie doll in the most bored tones possible. She tried to act out a scene from Act IV with Kumiko, but Abby just wanted her Barbies to go to the zoo of stuffed animals she’d arranged on the scruffy, geometric-patterned carpet.

Caroline was writing dialogue for the funeral director—who was a chain-smoker and had a significant stutter—that morning as they motored down the highway, Caroline’s little sister Abby in the wide front seat with their mother and Caroline sprawled out in the back, trying to keep the pen steady against the paper and the paper from fluttering in the breeze from the open windows. 

When that ominous, telltale rattle struck, the engine sputtered like the character on the page and the car began to slow. Caroline raised her head up and out of Yolanda’s world as, with a muttered “God damn it,” and several frantic stomps on the accelerator, her mother threw a half-smoked Marlboro Light out the open window and pulled the now-coasting car over to the side of the highway. They were still several miles out of town.

When the car finally stopped, Brenda slammed it into Park, Caroline pulled herself into a sitting position, wincing as her legs clung to the hot vinyl in protest, and the three of them all sat there for a moment in full, weighted silence. After a few seconds had passed, Caroline watched her mother lean her head forward onto the steering wheel. She couldn’t see her face. 

Abby craned her head around to look back at Caroline, eyes wide, and Caroline shook her head once. Then they both waited for a reaction from their mother, whose limp ponytail was slanting down across her eyes.

Finally, tired of waiting in the broiling heat of the motionless car, Caroline said, “Mom, try the ignition. Maybe it’ll start back up.” 

She saw the sigh more than heard it, and then Brenda lifted her head back up to snarl, “It’s not going to start back up,” in Caroline’s general direction, but even as she said it her hand went to the keys and twisted them forward. What followed was no sound, no fire, no nothing. Years later, when the memory of that day crossed Caroline’s mind, as it would occasionally since her mother’s death, she would always wonder why in the world either of them had thought that it might. 

“Damn it,” Brenda grunted, thumping one palm on the top of the steering wheel. After a moment, she opened the car door and got out, and Caroline and Abby followed suit. There were no cars whizzing by on the highway that Saturday morning, no potential saviors to give a ride to a stranded mother and her two daughters, as so many had before.

That morning, there was nothing but the three of three of them, Caroline holding her composition book and pen in one hand and wiping sweat off her legs with the other, Abby finger-combing the snarled tail of a battered Cherries Jubilee My Little Pony, and Brenda standing apart from them, defiantly not-quite-despairing, her hands on her hips, while she regarded the car.

Caroline thought of the scenes she’d written that week. Mr. Harris did the brainstorming sessions at the beginning of class; they only had a half-hour of idea time before an hour of writing. So far, her classmates hadn’t heard all that much about Caroline’s version of Yolanda—she hadn’t been ready to share, too wary of criticism that she felt might destroy her fragile creation—but she was loaded with dramatic details this time, with a story that felt air-tight and important. At the thought that he might start without her, an urgent panic set in. 

“I’m going to be late,” Caroline told her mother, and followed this up with a recriminatory, “And I’m going to get in trouble from Mr. Harris, too.” This was a lie; Mr. Harris never punished anyone for anything, much less being late for class.

Caroline watched her mother crease her lips in that familiar half-grimace, and she could almost hear the teeth grinding. Brenda took a step away and cast a resigned glance at everything else but her daughters: the road, the car, the fields. 

Finally, she said, “I’m going to walk back to that house we passed, just over there.” She motioned in that direction. The house was one of those two-story white farmhouses that dotted the highway every few miles or so; Caroline could just make out its pink roof over the tree line. 

She was still contemplating the house, wondering if Yolanda could live somewhere like that, when Brenda told her to stay with the car and “watch your sister,” a directive Caroline loathed on every level. 

“But what if someone stops and he’s a serial killer, or a rapist?”

Exaggerated patience staining her tone, Brenda said, “There are no serial killers around here.” She stepped around Abby and Caroline, moving toward the car. “If anyone stops, just tell them someone’s coming to get us. I think you’ll be fine.”

Caroline frowned at her back, following after her mother a few steps like a confused duckling. “You don’t know that. Just because they haven’t caught any serial killers doesn’t mean they aren’t here.”

Brenda tossed Caroline a quick, smoldering glance as she leaned through the open car door to collect her purse. “Then stay in the car. Roll up the windows and lock the doors.”

“You can’t just leave us in the car like a couple of dogs. It’s too hot! Abby will suffocate!” Not that Caroline cared much, but it felt like a good appeal—a line of dialogue appropriate to a devoted older sister. 

“Then leave the windows down,” her mother said, straightening up.

“Then what’s the point of locking the—”

“Fine, then!” Brenda slammed the car door closed, ripping a scream from the rusted hinges and cutting off Caroline’s final, victorious point. Her mouth flat, her eyes glaring slits in the sun, Brenda slung her purse across her body like a gun belt. “We’ll all go! We’ll all walk to the house together and leave the car here for someone to steal. Happy?”

Caroline couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother this angry, angry enough to shout. Awash in unexpected satisfaction, she kept herself from pointing out that anyone trying to steal the car would need a tow truck, because another bit of dialogue had popped into her brain. The thrill of her mother’s anger was making her reckless, and Caroline could suddenly see herself as the main character, center stage.

She pretended to think about her mother’s question, feeling the adrenaline coursing through her veins, then shrugged, allowing her eyes to roll. Her mother’s features began forming an angry scowl, but before she could speak, Caroline tossed her bangs out of her eyes and said, low but clear, “Dad would know what to do.”

In that moment, Caroline would swear her mother’s nostrils flared like a bull’s, scenting the defiance in the air. Brenda took one step closer to Caroline, but Caroline held her ground, secure in the four feet of grass-strewn gravel separating them and the spotlight that was still waiting. When her mother answered her challenge, every word was a separate, bitten-off warning: “He’s. Not. Here.”

Without hesitation, and with a sudden spurt of honest anger, Caroline gave voice to the accusation that had been fermenting resentfully in her for months. “Because of you.”

For the span of a full second, Brenda only stared at her oldest daughter, and Caroline thought dizzily, I did it. I really did it. Her eyes devoured the stillness of her mother’s face, sparing only brief recognition for Abby’s open-mouthed, round-eyed gaze tinged with shock and fear. This strange détente she and her mother had maintained ever since the day less than a year since that Dale Campbell disappeared into the wide world—leaving behind his family, some clothes, and a brief note that Brenda, white-faced and shaking, had immediately ripped into pieces after reading—couldn’t last forever.

The one moment of silence, which Caroline would later remember as seeming to hang, a tangible thing, in the air between them, was cut off when her mother, moving with unhurried purpose, crossed the few feet that separated them and delivered a slap that rocketed like an explosion across Caroline’s cheek and jaw and knocked her backward a full step. It burned, a hard, stinging conflagration, and flooded Caroline’s eyes with salt water. 

Her face pale and her eyes hard, Brenda stared her daughter down as Caroline clutched her cheek, shocked pain singing in her head. “Get walking,” Brenda said, cold as a glacier. 

With painful dignity, Caroline bent down to pick up her notebook and pen where they had fallen to the gravel and then glared at her mother though eyes filled with hot tears that were already beginning to streak down her face. Summoning all her anger and frustration, her bewilderment over her father, even her adolescent uncertainty and awkwardness—everything, Caroline somehow understood, that was part of her miserable life just then—Caroline put it into the only words that would come to her: “I hate you.” This was a trembling and painfully dramatic pronouncement, one that Mr. Harris might have called over-the-top, but in that moment, it was true.

Instead of responding to this, Caroline’s mother only shook her head, twisting her thin lips, and then turned on her heel to march off down the road. Caroline wiped at her stinging eyes, first with her fingers and then with the shoulder of her T-shirt, wincing when it scraped across her left cheek. It occurred to her to walk to town, or to walk home. Anything but following along. 

“Aren’t we going with Mom?” Abby asked. She clutched her pony with one arm and picked at an elbow scab with her free hand, and they both watched their mother get farther away with every second. 

After a few fulminating seconds of weighing what weren’t really options at all, Caroline began walking, too, leaving her sister to trail in her wake. 

Abby ran to catch up. “I don’t want to walk,” she whined, trying unsuccessfully to grab her sister’s free hand, still damp with tears, in her own sweaty brown paw. 

Still sparking with rage against everything in the entire world, Caroline shook her off and hissed, “Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid,” Abby muttered from where she had fallen into step behind Caroline.

  It was a long, silent trip. The heat was the kind that made beads of sweat burst from the skin of their necks and backs almost instantly, matting up the hair at the scalp with salt and damp. And the whole time, Caroline kept her eyes on the roof of the house and worked on imagining the kindly farm people there, who would never slap their kid even in the heat of pure rage, no matter how smart-alecky they were. 

Once she had them in her head—a slightly plump but active older couple, she with a sensible house dress and he with a cap from a seed company—Caroline imagined what the farm people would think when they got there: the frustrated mother and two frightened, obviously abused girls. They would witness Caroline’s red cheek, identify the guilt that would no doubt be lurking in her mother’s eyes by then even as she asked to use their phone. 

Instead of the tow truck, they would call the police and report Caroline’s mother for abuse, maybe even refusing to let Caroline and Abby leave with her. They would keep the girls at the pink-roofed house for a week or so, feeding them good, solid farm food instead of Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, until the welfare people would step in to say they’d found some willing foster parents, but the couple only wanted a younger child; they would regretfully say that Caroline would have to stay in a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. 

In the wake of Caroline’s impassioned protests against being separated from her sister—“We’re the only family we’ve got!”—the farm couple, who were probably named something like Martin and Ruth, would decide that they loved Caroline and Abby too much to let them go away to be separated and lost in the system. There would be a four-person family hug. Caroline’s heart swelled just thinking about it. This was better and more satisfying even than planning Yolanda’s eventual, triumphant flight to L.A. on her long-lost brother’s private jet.

But it wouldn’t be that easy, would it? There would be conflict. Mr. Harris said there had to be conflict to create a story. Their mother, Caroline realized, watching her cross the lawn to the house that was now in full view and getting closer, wouldn’t want to let the girls go, even though she obviously hated being their mother. Even though Caroline suspected she blamed Caroline and Abby for their father’s leaving. Even though it was probably Brenda’s fault in the first place. 

Stumbling along the side of the road, Caroline nearly teared up again, head stuffed with conflicting emotions. Of course, this would all go to court. Martin and Ruth wouldn’t give up. Caroline envisioned her mother in the courtroom, begging Caroline to forgive her, and Caroline refusing with just a shake of her head and a world of pity and scorn in her eyes. Caroline thought of a line from The Crucible that she’d liked, when the guy said he would “fall like an ocean on that court.” She wondered if she could use something like that when talking to the judge, or if that would be plagiarism.

Caroline’s brain was still singing with the happy ending of what could be when they finally stood on the front porch of the house, quiet, behind their mother as she knocked on the door.

Caroline held her breath and waited for her moment, only slightly surprised by the stout blonde woman who opened the screen door and wiped her hands on a dishrag as Brenda gave the polite but exasperated I’m-so-sorry-but-our-car-broke-down speech and asked to use their phone. The woman was wearing jeans and looked to be only a few years older than Caroline’s mother; at this point, Caroline doubted that her name was even Ruth.

The woman’s eyes drifted behind Brenda and slid over Abby and Caroline, huddled together—Caroline had taken Abby’s unresisting and still sweaty hand in hers in a last-minute burst of inspiration. Caroline smiled timidly, the left side of her face tilted prominently. The woman’s eyes lingered a moment there, and Caroline thought, yes.

Then the woman turned her full attention back to Brenda, with no sign of recognition of any plight or familial trauma in the two girls. “Sure, you can come on in,” she said, leaning out a bit to push the door open farther. 

Caroline’s moment was slipping away, so she decided to act, throwing all caution to the wind. “What about us?” Caroline asked her mother, taking care to let her voice tremble. “Are you just going to leave us out here, like you wanted to at the car before you hit me?”

Brenda’s mouth dropped open only slightly. Seemingly speechless, she looked at their benefactor and then back at Caroline, and mixed with the anger in her eyes was a kind of helpless, raging pain that, if Caroline had let it, would have jolted her clear down to the bone, would have shaken some guilt out of her in a way no physical means could have. As a mother herself decades later, alone like her mother was then, Caroline could recognize that pain for what it was: the kind that only your own children can deliver, wielding against you a profound, ruthless, innate power to inflict wounds so deep that you cannot afford to let anyone see them bleed.  

Even though other memories of that time in her life were faded like water-logged Polaroids, Caroline could still see that one moment so clearly that the memory of her mother’s face as it was just then, betrayed and naked on that farmhouse porch. It was an image that she never could scrub from her memory, one that she would think of now and again while arguing with her own teenage daughters or letting her mind drift as she lie awake in bed, and it would come with a flash of searing embarrassment and regret no matter how she tried to remember it fondly or think of it as a story to tell, something to laugh about. 

But standing there that day, thirteen and determined to make her mother bleed, Caroline was resolute. She held Abby’s hand tighter and sent a pleading glance to the blonde woman, who watched Caroline carefully for a few seconds, dishrag dangling from the hand she’d propped on one hip.  

This is it, Caroline thought, almost lightheaded. 

But when the woman looked back to Caroline’s mother, there was no recrimination on her face, no righteous, protective rage. She kicked up one side of her mouth, almost like a smile, and gave Brenda the kind of look that Caroline had seen from people her age who found out they’d had the same strict-as-hell teacher in third grade. 

And when she spoke, it wasn’t to Caroline. “If your girls want to, they can sit in the swing set in front of the house ‘til you’re ready to head back. There’s shade there.”

“Thank you,” Brenda said, exhaling audibly. Holding on to the handle of the screen door, she swiveled her head back. “You heard her,” she said, looking straight at Caroline where she stood, feeling the first stirrings of shame. Unbidden, Caroline thought of John Proctor again—only it was her mother who was the accused. The persecuted. 

When Caroline finally nodded, not trusting her vocal cords to hold steady, her mother smiled a little, too. This was not the distorted, bitter curve Caroline so often saw, and neither was it a vilified smile—this was knowing, confident, like Brenda understood what Caroline was feeling and wanted her to go on feeling it for awhile. 

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she informed her daughter. “Keep an eye on your sister.” With that, Brenda stepped into the house. The screen door banged shut behind her.  

As if the door shutting was a starting pistol, Abby sprinted over to claim the swing set, which had a faded, peeling pink paint job and a liberal sprinkling of rust. All earlier drama either forgiven or forgotten, she wrestled herself into one of the cracked, plastic-bottomed swings, singing, “Come and push me!” 

Abby was already beginning to pump her legs and propel herself up into the air, Cherries Jubilee lying tangled in the grass, by the time Caroline made her way across the yard. Caroline’s throat was clogged again with heat and unshed tears. Maybe she would just run away—just pack some clothes some night, write a note for Abby, and leave. Someone was mowing hay in a nearby field, and the breeze was heavy with the smell. Maybe she could find their father, find out why he had left. She could go to L.A. and live like Yolanda would; Mr. Harris said it was easier to write about places you’d been. The chains of the swing, gritty with age, creaked in protest as Abby jerked them backward and forward. 

“Push me!” she demanded again. Stirred out of her planning, Caroline wordlessly reached out an arm, planting her hand on her sister’s back and following through the upward-arcing trajectory, Abby’s T-shirt warm and moistly solid beneath Caroline’s palm and fingers. When Abby came careening back, hair flying forward around her face, Caroline did it again, and Abby squealed, a delighted crack of childish noise in the otherwise quiet yard. 

Some of the pressure in Caroline’s chest began to ease, although her thirteen-year-old self couldn’t understand this. Abby’s giggles, loud and zesty, made the swing zig and zag as she rose and fell again, which only made her laugh harder. Smiling despite herself, Caroline stepped behind the swing set, letting her notebook and pen drop to the grass. She would pick the notebook up again—it was too important to leave there on the ground—but she couldn’t hold onto it right now. 

She reached out both arms then, palms open, and the lingering embarrassment and impotent dreams yielded ground in her head to something simpler, something easier to manage: the moment that gravity would bring Abby back to her, and Caroline would send her flying again.

***

Mary Morris’s work has appeared in Under the Gum Tree, Hypertext, Carve, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere, and she co-authored (as Phoebe Walker) the urban-fantasy novel Mirror Witch. A freelance fiction editor with an MFA from SIUC, Mary lives in southeastern Illinois with her husband, her children, and miscellaneous cats.