Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 22

 

Afterword

 

So much of this is simply not believable. I’d love to give Vickie the benefit of the doubt—after all, I have to admit she is one of the most imaginative students I ever had. And she was not in my class all that long before she disappeared from school. I never saw her again, but, as you know, I did receive some packets of her “papers”—this being the third.

There are so many things to disbelieve here that I could make a massive list. But I’ll say only this: Does she really expect us to accept the notion that the ghosts or spirits or whatever of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, the Frankenstein creature, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville appeared to her? Rescued her—more than once!—from the evil Dr. Eastbrook and his human cloning experiments?

That Irving decapitated the doctor, who then disappeared into the earth?  His complaining head bouncing along behind him? When I read that, I didn’t know whether to laugh or vomit.

Okay, this I know is true: Washington Irving could actually ride—and well. In his 1834 book, A Tour on the Prairies, he writes about going on a buffalo hunt out in the Oklahoma Territory. (I have to confess: I never read that book. I just looked it up.)

Anyway, I think, too, about how most of my eighth graders over the years had never heard of most of those writers whom Vickie has written about—and certainly had not read anything by them. To be honest, most of them could not read them even if they wanted to—as I discovered when I considered teaching Frankenstein that fall I had Vickie in class. Times had changed; Vickie was … unusual.

Anyway, I’m certain that this ends The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein—or Vickie Stone, as we all knew her. Supposedly, she and her family moved out to Oklahoma somewhere, and I have no idea if they stayed there—or if they moved on once again after their confrontation with Dr. Eastbrook and the other villains in her story.

I’ve tried searches on the Internet … but all is silent about all of this—as if these people never existed, as if these events never occurred.

But here’s what bothers me—and will bother me the rest of my life: I knew the girl who called herself Vickie Stone. She sat in my classroom. Spoke to me.

So how …?