Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,26

the first time in my life I felt what it’s like to wield some power. Girls who had never before been nice to me now smiled and said hello in the hallways. Faculty took me aside to give me subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions about which teacher or student would be a good subject for my next profile. I hadn’t written about Principal Evelyn yet, Sister Agatha reminded me. She had a very interesting background. Why not interview her? Surely she deserved a profile.

But I ignored all their suggestions and turned instead to my truest allies at the school, the charity cases. Over lunch in the cafeteria, I interviewed Soo Chee Chong, the quietest girl on campus. Who ever knew that Soo spoke fluent Mandarin? Or that she had ended up in Baton Rouge, of all places, because her parents, both prominent university professors back in Beijing, had fled the Cultural Revolution to avoid being killed by the Red Guards? If they didn’t like you, Soo said, the soldiers would just walk up to you in the street and shoot you in the face. The whole family had made a lucky escape through Taiwan, smuggled across the strait in the bottom of a fishing boat, which was why to this day, Soo said, she couldn’t stand the smell of raw fish. Her name in Chinese, she told me, meant “the beautiful sound of jade.”

Anne Harding, after years of surgery and doctor’s visits, turned out to be an expert on scoliosis. The piece I wrote about her, “Profile in Courage,” dwelt on current medical treatments for curvature of the spine and what could be done to prevent it. Curvature, Anne explained, was measured in degrees of variance from the vertical. At eighteen degrees, hers was considered a mild curve and could be corrected with bracing in 90 percent of the cases. If left untreated, however, the deformity could worsen, twisting the chest until the ribs jutted to one side, the breasts and hips became uneven, and one shoulder tilted up high toward the ear. Every teenage girl should be checked annually for curvature of the spine, Anne said, which led to a rush on Nurse Palmer’s office the week the piece was printed.

And in my profile on Christy Lee, the near-invisible lone black student in our sophomore class, she revealed how she had managed to trace her family roots all the way back to the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a slave trader named Captain Burt Keenan who had sold her great-great-great-grandfather, branded and chained, to a plantation owner in Charleston for two thousand dollars—which, Christy pointed out, was actually a high price to pay for a man in those days. Christy provided the title herself for that piece: “Let Freedom Ring.”

The charity cases seemed to become a little less shy after their articles were published, a little less bitter. Girls would stop at our lunch table to get Soo Chee Chong to write their names in Chinese characters on the front of their notebooks. From time to time I even saw Anne Harding laughing aloud in the hallway, her chin bobbling against her neck brace. The journalism students at LSU had been right. There was power in writing. Words held magic that could transform people.

That spring, too, Chip Benton started to become a regular at our tiny newspaper staff office. He was always dropping off photos of CHS events we might use, or offering us extra bottles of toner solution. We had our own school photographers, of course, but Chip was such a good-natured fellow, and his curly helmet of hair was so cute—and he was a boy, after all, which was such a weird novelty at SHA—that we were always happy to have him around.

And true to his word, he gave me signed prints of the photos he took of me that night at the Italian restaurant. He’d blown them up and developed and cropped them in such a way that they looked moody and evocative, like stills from a 1950s black-and-white movie, or celebrity nightclub photos from an era more glamorous and richly lived than our own. They were gorgeous, really—funny and profound, silly and tender all at once. I kept them in a desk drawer in my dorm room. I didn’t dare put them up on the walls—they seemed too intimate, somehow—but from time to time I took them out to admire them.

I was adapting so well to life at Sacred Heart that year, in fact, that I