“Hey!” I grin at Jesse as though we’re good friends. Behind us, the Russo twins stop laughing, which has less to do with me and more to do with Margo Atherton, who stands by the bus peeling off her sweatshirt, exposing six inches of stomach as her T-shirt rides up, but I still feel like I’ve done a good thing. Jesse says nothing as we board the bus and take our seats. Before we take off, though, he gathers up his stuff and moves down the aisle to me.
“Can I sit here?” he asks, pointing to the empty seat. I pull off my headphones, nod, and move my backpack out of the way. Jesse sits with a sigh, tips his head back. He stays like that until the bus shudders on and drives out of the parking lot, back onto the highway.
“Those guys are morons,” I say.
His eyes snap open and he inhales sharply. “They’re not so bad,” he says, opening his novel and turning his body a little away from me.
“But they were being dicks to you,” I say, as though he might not have realized.
“Really, it’s ok,” he says without looking up from the book. He clutches the pages, chipped black polish on his fingernails.
In Quebec City, Madame Laurent leads us through the cobblestone streets, pointing out the historical architecture—the Notre-Dame Quebec Cathedral, the Château Frontenac. Jesse and I barely acknowledge each other as we hang back from the rest of the group, watch the mimes perform on their big granite pedestals, ride the funicular from upper town to lower town and back again. He buys chintzy souvenirs: a watercolor of the Château Frontenac from an old woman on the street and a spoon with a scene from the Winter Carnival etched on the back, which he offers to me. We catch up with the group an hour later and I expect to be in trouble, but no one even noticed we were gone. For the rest of the afternoon, Jesse and I again sneak away, wandering the Old City streets without talking much, just nudging each other every once in a while to point out something funny or strange.
On the second day of the trip I try calling Strane from a pay phone, but there’s no answer and I don’t dare leave a message. Jesse doesn’t ask me who I’m trying to call, doesn’t need to.
“He’s probably on campus,” he says. “There’s a coffeehouse open mic thing today in the library. They make all the humanities faculty go to them.”
I stare at him as I slide the phone card back in my pocket.
“You don’t have to worry,” he says. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“How do you know?”
He gives me a look, like, Are you kidding? “You’re together all the time. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on. Plus, I saw it up close firsthand.”
I think of what Strane said about foster homes and jails. I’m not sure what I’ve said counts as telling Jesse, but to be sure, I say, “It’s not true.” The words sound so pathetic he just gives me another look. Like, Please.
We leave on Sunday morning. An hour into the bus ride home, Jesse sighs and sets his novel upside down on his lap, looks over at me, motions for me to take off my headphones.
“You know it’s a stupid thing to do, right?” he asks. “Like, unbelievably dumb.”
“What is?”
He gives me a long look. “You and your teacher boyfriend.”
My eyes skim the seats surrounding us, but everyone seems preoccupied—sleeping, or reading, or with their headphones on.
He continues. “It doesn’t really bother me morally or anything. I’m just saying he’ll probably ruin your life.”
I ignore how cleanly his words cut and say it’s worth the risk. I wonder how I sound to him, delusional, brave, or both. Jesse shakes his head.
“What?”
“You’re an idiot,” he says, “that’s all.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I don’t mean that as an insult. I’m an idiot, too, in my own way.”
Jesse saying I’m an idiot reminds me of Strane calling me a dark romantic—both seem to point to an inclination toward bad decision-making. The other day Strane referred to me as a “depressive,” and I looked up the word: a person with a tendency toward melancholy.
A bad storm hits Norumbega and we wake to a glittering campus shrouded in a half inch of ice. Tree limbs bow under the weight, arching toward the ground, and the snow crust is so thick we can walk atop it without our boots breaking through. On a Saturday afternoon, on the couch in Strane’s office, we have sex for the first time in sunlight. Afterward, I avoid looking at his naked body by watching dust motes swirl in the weak winter sun tinged green from the sea glass window. He traces road maps of blue veins on my skin, talks about how hungry I make him, that he’d eat me if he could. I wordlessly offer him my arm. Go ahead. He gives it only a soft-mouthed bite, but I would probably let him tear me apart. I’d let him do anything.
February comes and I am both better and worse at hiding things. I stop bringing up Strane during my Sunday night phone calls home, but I can’t stay away from his classroom. I’m a permanent fixture there now. Even when other students come in for homework help during faculty service hour, I’m planted at the seminar table, pretending to be absorbed in my work but eavesdropping so intensely my ears burn.
One afternoon when we’re alone, he takes a Polaroid camera from his briefcase and asks if he can take a photo of me at the seminar table. “I want to remember what you look like sitting there,” he says. I immediately start to laugh from nerves. I touch my face and tug at my hair. I hate having my photo taken. “You can say no,” he says, but I see the longing in his eyes, how important this must be. Refusing would break his heart. So I let him snap a few of me, both at the seminar table and sitting behind his desk, another on the couch in the office, my feet tucked up and my notebook open on my lap. He’s so grateful, grinning as he watches them develop. He says he’ll treasure them forever.
Another afternoon he brings me a new book to read—Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. I start to flip through as soon as he gives it to me, but it doesn’t look like a novel; the pages show a long poem, a series of footnotes.
“It’s a difficult book,” Strane explains. “Less accessible than Lolita. It’s the type of novel that asks the reader to relinquish control. You have to experience it rather than try to understand it. Postmodernism . . .” He trails off, seeing the disappointment on my face. I wanted another Lolita.
“Let me show you something.” He takes the paperback from my hands, flips to a page, and points to a stanza. “Look, it seems to reference you.”
Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,
My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest
My Admirable butterfly! Explain
How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,
Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade
Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?
My breath catches; my face goes hot.
“Uncanny, isn’t it?” He smiles down at the page. “My dark Vanessa, worshipped and caressed.” He smooths his hand down my hair, twirls a lock around his finger. Crimson-barred, maple-red hair. I think of what I said when he showed me the Jonathan Swift poem, about all this feeling destined. I hadn’t really meant it then. I said it only to show him how happy and willing I was. But seeing my name on the page this time feels like a free fall, a loss of control. Maybe this really was predetermined. Maybe I was made for this.
We’re still huddled over the book, Strane’s hand resting on my back, when old, balding Mr. Noyes walks into the classroom. We dart off in opposite directions, me back to the seminar table and Strane behind his desk, obviously caught. But Mr. Noyes seems unbothered. He laughs and says to Strane, “I see you’ve got a classroom pet,” as though it’s no big deal. It makes me wonder if we have to worry so much about getting caught. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the school finds out. They could give Strane a slap on the wrist, tell him to hold off until I graduate and turn eighteen.
When Mr. Noyes leaves, I ask Strane, “Have other students and teachers done this?”
“Done what?”
>
“This.”
He looks up from his desk. “It’s been known to happen.”
He turns back to reading as the next question rests heavy on my tongue. Before I let it out, I look down at my hands. I imagine the answer laid out plainly on his face and don’t want to see it. I don’t really want to know.
“What about you? Have you, with another student?”
“Do you think I have?” he asks.
I look up, caught off guard. I don’t know what I think. I know what I want to believe, what I have to believe, but I have no idea how those things align with what might’ve happened in all the years before me. He’s been a teacher for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Strane watches as I grapple for words, a smile creeping across his face. Finally, he says, “The answer is no. Even if I had moments of desire, it never would’ve seemed worth the risk. Not until you came along.”
I try to hide how happy this makes me feel by rolling my eyes, but his words break my chest wide open and leave me helpless. There’s nothing stopping him from reaching in and grabbing whatever he wants. I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.
I’m reading Pale Fire when Ms. Thompson knocks on my door for curfew check. She peeks her head around the door, her makeup off, hair tied up in a scrunchie; she sees me and checks my name off her list.
“Vanessa, hey.” She steps into the room. “Remember to sign out before you leave on Friday, ok? You forgot before Christmas break.”
She takes a step closer and I dog-ear the page I’m reading, close the novel. I feel light-headed from finding more evidence of myself in the text: the town where the main character lives is “New Wye.”
“How’s the homework?” she asks.
I’ve never asked Strane about Ms. Thompson. Since the Halloween dance, I haven’t seen them together, and I remember how, after he and I had sex for the first time, he said it had been a while since he’d “been intimate.” If they never had sex, then they were only friends, so there’s no need for me to be jealous. I know all that. Still, when I’m around her a meanness takes over me, an urge to give her a glimpse of what I’ve done, what I’m capable of.
I set down Pale Fire so she can see the cover. “It’s not homework. Or, I guess it kind of is. It’s for Mr. Strane.”
She gives me a smile, irritatingly benign. “You have Mr. Strane for English?”
“Yup.” I look up through my eyelashes. “He’s never talked to you about me?”
The wrinkles in her forehead deepen. The look lasts only for a second. If I wasn’t on high alert, I wouldn’t even notice it. “Can’t say that he has,” she says.
“That’s surprising,” I say. “He and I are pretty close.”
I watch the suspicion bloom on her face, a sense of something amiss.
The next afternoon while Strane is at a faculty meeting, I sit behind his desk, something I would never dare to do otherwise. The door is closed, no witnesses to see me thumb through his piles of ungraded assignments and lesson plans and pull open the long, skinny desk drawer that has the weird stuff in it: an opened bag of gumdrops, a pendant of St. Christopher on a broken chain, a bottle of antidiarrhea medicine that I shove to the back in disgust.
There usually isn’t anything interesting on his computer, only a file of class documents and his rarely used school email, but when I interrupt the screensaver, an alert pops up on the task bar: (1) New Message from [email protected]. I click it open. The email is responding to another, three total in the chain.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Student Concern
Hi Jake . . . I’d like to talk to you about this in person but thought I’d send an email . . . might be good to put this in writing anyway. I had an odd interaction with Vanessa Wye the other night that involved you. She was doing some homework for your class and mentioned that you and she are “close.” It was how she said it . . . gave me a sense of some resentment there . . . even possessiveness? Definitely seems like she’s got a crush on you . . . something to be aware of. I know you said she hangs around your classroom. Just be careful :) Melissa
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: re: Student Concern
Melissa,
Appreciate the heads up. I’ll keep an eye on it.
JS
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: re: re: Student Concern
No problem . . . hope I didn’t overstep . . . just picked up a vibe. Have a good break if I don’t see you :) Melissa
I click out of the email chain, marking the most recent one from Ms. Thompson as unread. The curtness of his response makes me laugh out loud, as does Ms. Thompson’s nervousness, her little smiley faces, the dot-dot-dots stringing together incomplete sentences. It occurs to me that maybe she isn’t a smart person, or at least not as smart as me. I’ve never thought that about a teacher before.
Strane returns from the faculty meeting in a bad mood, drops his yellow legal pad on his desk and lets out a half sigh, half groan. “This place is going to hell,” he mutters. Squinting at the computer monitor, he asks, “Did you touch this?” I shake my head. “Hmm.” He grabs the mouse, clicks around. “Might need to put a password on this thing.”
At the end of faculty service hour, when he’s packing his briefcase, I say in a tone so painfully blasé it doesn’t even sound like me, “You know Ms. Thompson is my dorm parent, right?”
I busy myself with putting on my coat so I don’t have to look at him while he chooses his answer.
“I do know that,” he says.
I drag my zipper up to my throat. “So, you and her are friends?”
“Sure.”
“Because I remember seeing you together at the Halloween dance.” I peek over at him, watch him wipe his glasses on his tie, put them back on.
“So you did read my email,” he says. When I don’t say anything, he crosses his arms and gives me one of his teacher looks. Cut the bullshit.
“Were you more than friends?” I ask.
“Vanessa.”
“I’m just asking a question.”
“You are,” he agrees, “but it’s a loaded question.”
I pull my zipper up and down a few times. “I don’t really care either way. It would just be nice to know.”
“And why is that?”
“Because what if she senses there’s something going on with you and me? She might get jealous and—”
“And what?”
“I don’t know. Retaliate?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“She wrote those emails.”
Strane leans back in his chair. “I think the best solution to this problem is for you not to read my email.”
I roll my eyes. He’s being evasive, which means the truth isn’t what I want to hear, and probably means he and Ms. Thompson were more than friends. They probably had sex.
I throw my backpack over one shoulder. “You know, I’ve seen her without makeup. She’s not that pretty. Also, she’s kind of fat.”
“Come on,” he chides, “that’s not nice.”
I glower at him. Of course it isn’t nice; that’s the whole point. “I’m leaving now. I guess I’ll see you in a week.”
Before I open the classroom door, he says, “You shouldn’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
He stands, moves around his desk and across the classroom toward me. He reaches over my shoulder and flips off the lights, takes my face in his hands, kisses my forehead. “Ok,” he says softly. “Ok, you’re not jealous.”
I let him pull me in, my cheek resting against the middle of his chest. His heart echoes in my ear.
“I’m not envious of whatever dalliances you might’ve had before me,” he says.
“I can’t help what I did before I met you,” he says, “and neither can you.”
For me, there’s nothing before him, nothing at all, but I know that’s not the point. This is about him needing something from me. Not quite forgiveness, more like absolution, or maybe apathy. He needs me not to care about the things he’s done.
“Ok,” I say. “I won’t be jealous anymore.” It feels so generous, like I’m making a sacrifice for him. I’ve never felt so adult.
* * *
Last summer when I was at the height of my sulking, Mom tried to give me a pep talk about boys. She didn’t understand what had actually happened with Jenny. She thought it had all been about Tom, that I’d liked him, that he’d chosen Jenny over me or something equally clichéd. It takes time for boys to see anything beyond what’s right in front of them, she’d said, and then launched into some allegory about apples falling from trees and boys going for the easy-to-pick apples first but eventually learning that the best apples take a little more work. I wanted none of it.
“So you’re saying girls are fruit that only exist for boys to eat?” I asked. “Sounds sexist.”
“No,” she says, “that’s not what I’m saying at all.”
“You’re literally calling me a bad apple.”
“I’m not,” she says. “The other girls are bad apples.”
“Why do any girls have to be bad apples? Why do we have to be apples at all?”
Mom took a deep breath, pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “My god, you’re difficult,” she says. “All I’m saying is it takes longer for boys to mature. I just don’t want you to feel frustrated.”
My Dark Vanessa Page 13
