David Cristofano - The Girl She Used to Be

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2009 by David Cristofano

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

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New York, NY 10017

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First eBook Edition: March 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-446-54427-6

For Jana

Thanks first to my wife, Jana, who has unconditionally supported me throughout this journey, and who has endured and sacrificed in ways that I will never fully comprehend. No accomplishment on my partincluding this bookwould have occurred without her. She is my first reader and my first love.

Thanks to my editors at Grand Central, Michele Bidelspach and Melanie Murray, who caught the missteps and molded the story into the final polished product youre holding. It would not be nearly the same novel without their guidance and attention to detail. They are wonderful people to work with. And thanks to Tareth Mitch, Karen Thompson, and all the folks at Grand Central, especially Jamie Raab, for taking an early and active interest in the project.

I am eternally grateful to my agent, Pamela Harty, for her passion and commitment and professionalism, and for making the entire process fun and fulfilling. She is the kind of agent every writer hopes to have. Thanks, too, to Deidre Knight and all the pros at the Knight Agency for keeping the publishing machinery in motion.

Thanks also to Amelia Madison for getting the boulder to the edge of the cliff, and to Lauren Baratz-Logsted for being the impetus.

And to my parents, Francis and Helen Cristofano, for fostering a love of reading at an early age, and for providing a house always well stocked with books.

And thanks to God, for every page, every sentence, every word.

All farewells should be sudden, when forever.

Lord Byron, from Sardanapalus

N AME ME. GAZE INTO MY EYES, STUDY MY SMILE AND MY DIMPLES and tell me who you see. I look like an Emma. I look like an Amy. I look like a Katherine. I look like a Kathryn. I look like your best friends sister, your sisters best friend. Introduce me. Yell for me. Let me run away and call me back. Run your fingers through my hair and whisper my name.

Call me whatever you want; its just a name, after all.

When I was born, my parents assembled a string of vowels and consonants so magical, so rhythmic and haunting, that the human form had yet to be married to such beauty.

When I was six, it was taken away.

And because of my ineptitude and innocent inability to keep a secret, they took it away again when I was eight.

And at nine. At eleven. Twice at thirteen.

Not to worry: the Federal Government was quick to replace the old with the new, to clean up the mess and move us along to the next bland, underpopulated town, to another dot on the map that serves as nothing more than a break from the interstate, a pit stop on the way to some greater place; you know them, but forget them. There has to be a Middletown in almost every state, and Ive already lived in or near three of them.

But as temporary as it was, each instance was home, the place where Mom and Dad would be waiting at the end of the day, where the bills got paid, the lawn got mowed, and the mail was delivered. And it had to be. This was the consistent, perverted promise of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Today is Tuesday, which means Im sitting at the head of a classroom facing a semi-arc of high school juniors, all with their heads bowed, taking a geometry pop quiz. They are not the brightest bunch, having to take geometry as juniors and all, but they are sweet and genuine and seem to have more character than the Advanced Placement Calculus juniors I teach in the following periodespecially since most kids do not elect to take math as a junior. I spend as much time teaching them proofs as I do the works of Euclid or Gauss or Pythagoras because it is the proofs that will serve them well in life; theyre learning logic. Though I may be less effective than I hope; sadly, today is Tuesday and they are taking that pop quizthe same day of the week, every week, that I give a pop quizand there are always a few who are surprised.

Life will be cruel to them.

But above all, I try to teach one central lesson in every classand if they get this I will make sure they pass: Each and every equation brings an absolute certain conclusion. Well, that and dont divide by zero. You see, certainty brings security. Security brings trust. Trust brings love.

Pascal was quite the romantic, eh? And who knows what Edmund Landau was really thinking when he popularized Big O Notation, but I like to pretend.

These kids, Americas future at its most average, are getting something from me that theyre not getting from the loud, furry-nostriled political science teacher whose classroom backs to minethat is, an understanding of life.

Under my wing, youll learn that every problem has at least one solution, that logic may follow more than one path as long as it reaches the correct destination, that its always best to break an equation down into its simplest parts before solving it. And then and only then will you reach a conclusion and find the warmth of certainty, a certainty you will need when youre grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night for the third time and whisked off to another town in another state, having left behind friends you will neither see nor communicate with ever again, where you will sit and listen to your parents cry themselves to sleep and keep secrets from you that you will only occasionally be privy to when their prayers turn into a discernible loud whisper, and you will need that certainty when your father looks at you at the breakfast table and tries to ask you to pass the Cheerios but pauses for three secondsthree secondsto search for your name from the many pedestrian identities that have come and gone from your life, though not so long ago assigned to you by a federal employee.

So yes, Furry Nostrils can keep his histories of battles and conflicts gone by; were fighting the real war right here in Geometry.

I reach behind my neck and grab my auburn hair and try to twist it into a ponytail, but its a teachers-salary haircut in the growing-out phase and the best I can do is leave myself looking like a svelte samurai. I put my arms above my head and stretch, and as I glance across the room I see one of my students, a boy named Benjamin, staring at my chestlikely a struggle at any distance, really, but his gaze is steady and undeterred. He, at sixteen, is only ten years my junior, but his interest in my body is just as much perverse as it is illegal. I drop my arms and sink in my chair and notice his gaze remains unchanged and it occurs to me hes not looking at me, hes looking through me. Suddenly he snaps his fingers and smiles, bows his head, and begins fervently writing on his quiz sheet.

I, you see, did not follow the path of logic and my punishment was arriving at the wrong conclusion. I, indeed, failed.