“No kidding.” Mr. Strane thinks for a moment. “Do you get lonely out there?”
For a moment, I’m dumbstruck. The question slices a painless cut, shockingly clean. Even though lonely isn’t a word I’d ever used to describe how it feels living out there deep in the woods, hearing Mr. Strane say it now makes me think it must be true, probably has always been true, and suddenly I’m embarrassed, imagining that loneliness plastered all over my face, obvious enough that a teacher needs only one look to know I’m a lonely person. I manage to say, “I guess sometimes,” but Mr. Strane has already moved on, asking Greg Akers what it was like to move from Chicago to the foothills of western Maine.
Once we all introduce ourselves, Mr. Strane says his class will be the hardest we take this year. “Most students tell me I’m the toughest teacher at Browick,” he says. “I’ve had some say I’m tougher than their college professors.” He drums his fingers against the table and lets the gravity of this information settle onto us. Then he walks to the chalkboard, grabs a piece of chalk, and begins to write. Over his shoulder, he says, “You should already be taking notes.”
We scramble for our notebooks as he launches into a lecture about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” which I’ve never heard of, and I can’t be the only one, but when he asks the class if we’re familiar with it, we all nod. No one wants to look stupid.
While he lectures, I sneak glances around the room. The bones of it are the same as all the others in the humanities building—hardwood floors, a wall of built-in bookcases, green chalkboards, a seminar table—but his classroom feels lived-in and comfortable. There’s a rug with a worn path down its center, a big oak desk lit by a green banker’s lamp, a coffeemaker and a mug with the Harvard seal sitting atop a filing cabinet. The smell of cut grass and the sound of a car engine starting drift in through the open window, and at the chalkboard Mr. Strane writes a line from Longfellow with such intensity the chalk crumbles in his hand. At one point, he stops, turns to us, and says, “If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.” I do my best to copy down everything he says word for word.
With five minutes left of class, the lecture suddenly stops. Mr. Strane’s hands drop to his sides, his shoulders slump. Abandoning the chalkboard, he sits at the seminar table, rubs his face, and heaves a sigh. Then in a weary voice he says, “The first day is always so long.”
Around the table, we wait, unsure what to do, our pens hovering above our notebooks.
He drops his hands from his face. “I’ll be honest with you all,” he says. “I’m fucking tired.”
Across the table, Jenny laughs in surprise. Sometimes teachers joke around in class, but I’ve never heard one say “fuck.” It never occurred to me that a teacher could.
“Do you mind if I use four-letter words?” he asks. “I guess I should have gotten your permission first.” He clasps his hands together, sarcastically sincere. “If my use of colorful language truly offends anyone here, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
No one, of course, says anything.
* * *
The first few weeks of the year pass quickly, a succession of classes, breakfasts of black tea and lunches of peanut butter sandwiches, study hours in the library, evenings of WB shows in the Gould common room. I get detention for skipping a dorm meeting, but convince Ms. Thompson to let me walk her dog rather than sit with her in the dorm study for an hour, something neither of us wants to do. I spend most mornings before class finishing last-minute homework, because no matter how hard I try, I’m always scrambling, always on the brink of falling behind. Teachers insist this is something I should be able to fix; they say I’m smart but unfocused and unmotivated, slightly nicer ways of saying I’m lazy.
Within a matter of days after moving in, my room turns into a mess of clothes, loose papers, and half-drunk mugs of tea. I lose the day planner that was supposed to help me stay on top of things, but that’s to be expected because I lose everything. At least once a week, I open my door to find my keys hanging from the knob, left by whoever found them in a bathroom or classroom or dining hall. I can’t keep track of anything—textbooks end up wedged between my bed and the wall, homework smashed at the bottom of my backpack. Teachers are forever exasperated at my crumpled assignments, reminding me of the points they’ll take off for messiness.
“You need an organization system!” my AP history teacher cries as I flip frantically through my textbook for the notes I’d taken the day before. “It’s only the second week. How can you be so muddled already?” That I eventually find the notes doesn’t negate his point: I am sloppy, which is a sign of weakness, a serious character flaw.
At Browick teachers and their advisees have dinner together once a month, traditionally at the teacher’s house, but my advisor, Mrs. Antonova, never invites us over. “I must have boundaries,” she says. “Not all teachers agree with me, that’s ok. They have students all over their lives, that’s ok. But not me. We go somewhere, we eat, talk a little bit, then we all go home. Boundaries.”
On our first meeting of the year, she takes us to the Italian restaurant downtown. As I’m concentrating on winding linguine around my fork, Mrs. Antonova notes that lack of organization is my most urgent faculty feedback topic. I try not to sound too dismissive when I say I’ll work on it. She goes around the table telling all her advisees their feedback points. No one else has organization issues, but mine isn’t the worst; Kyle Guinn hasn’t turned in assignments in two of his classes, a serious offense. When Mrs. Antonova reads his feedback, the rest of us stare down at our pasta, relieved we aren’t as bad off as him. At the end of dinner, our plates cleared, she passes around a tin of homemade doughnut holes with cherry filling.
“These are pampushky,” she says. “Ukrainian, like my mother.”
As we leave the restaurant and head back up the hill to campus, Mrs. Antonova falls into step beside me. “I forgot to say, Vanessa, you should do an extracurricular this year. Maybe more than one. You must think about college applications. Right now, you look flimsy.” She starts making suggestions and I nod along. I know I need to get involved more and I have tried—last week I went to join the French club but promptly left when I realized its members wore little black berets during every meeting.
“What about the creative writing club?” she says. “It would fit you, with your poetry.”
I’ve thought about that, too. The creative writing club puts out a literary journal, and last year, I read it cover to cover, compared my poems with the published ones, and tried to be objective as I decided whose were better. “Yeah, maybe,” I say.
She touches her hand to my shoulder. “Think about it,” she says. “Mr. Strane is the faculty advisor this year. He’s smart on the subject.”
Looking over her shoulder, she claps and calls out something in Russian to the stragglers lagging behind, which, for whatever reason, is more effective than English at getting us to hurry up.
The creative writing club has one other member, Jesse Ly—a junior, Browick’s closest thing to a goth, rumored to be gay. When I walk into the classroom, he sits at the seminar table in front of a stack of papers, his combat boots propped up on a chair, a pen tucked behind his ear. He glances at me but says nothing. I doubt he even knows my name.
Mr. Strane, though, jumps up from behind his desk and strides across the room to me. “Here for the club?” he asks.
I open my mouth, unsure what to say. If I’d known there would be only one other person I probably wouldn’t have come. I want to back out right then, but Mr. Strane is too delighted, shaking my hand and saying, “You’re going to increase our membership by one hundred percent,” so it feels like I can’t change my mind.
He leads me to the seminar table, sits beside me, explains that the stack of papers contains submissions for the lit journal. “It’s all student work,” he says. “Do your best to
ignore the names. Read each one carefully, all the way through, before you make a decision.” He says I should write my comments in the margins, then assign each submission a number from one to five, one being a definite no and five a definite yes.
Without looking up, Jesse says, “I’ve been doing checks. It’s what we used last year.” He gestures to the papers he’s already gone through; on the upper right corner of each there’s a tiny check, check-minus, or check-plus. Mr. Strane raises his eyebrows, obviously annoyed, but Jesse doesn’t notice. His eyes are fixed on the poem he’s reading.
“Whatever method you two decide on is fine,” Mr. Strane says. He smiles at me, winks. As he gets up, he pats my shoulder.
With Mr. Strane across the classroom, back behind his desk, I pull a submission from the stack, a short story titled “The Worst Day of Her Life,” by Zoe Green. Zoe was in my algebra class last year. She sat behind me and laughed whenever Seth McLeod called me Big Red as though it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I shake my head and try to push the bias out of my mind. This is why Mr. Strane said not to look at the names.
Her story is about a girl in a hospital waiting room whose grandmother dies, and I’m bored by the end of the first paragraph. Jesse catches me flipping to check how many pages there are and in a low voice says, “You really don’t have to read the whole thing if it’s bad. I edited the lit journal last year when Mrs. Bloom was the faculty advisor and she didn’t care.”
My eyes dart to Mr. Strane sitting behind his desk, bent over his own stack of papers. Shrugging, I say, “I’ll keep reading. It’s ok.”
Jesse squints at the page in my hands. “Zoe Green? Isn’t that the girl who lost it during the debate tournament last year?” It was—Zoe, assigned to argue for the death penalty, broke down in tears during the final round when her opponent, Jackson Kelly, called her position racist and immoral, which probably wouldn’t have rattled her so badly if Jackson weren’t black. After Jackson was declared the tournament winner, Zoe said she’d felt personally attacked by his rebuttal, which was against the debate rules, so they ended up sharing first place, which was bullshit and everyone knew it.
Jesse leans forward and pulls Zoe’s story out of my hands, marks a check-minus on the right-hand corner, and tosses it in the “no” pile. “Voilà,” he says.
For the rest of the hour while Jesse and I read, Mr. Strane grades papers at his desk at the back of the room, occasionally leaving to make photocopies or get water for the coffeemaker. At one point, he peels an orange and its scent fills the room. At the end of the hour, as I stand to leave, Mr. Strane asks if I’ll come to the next meeting.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m still trying out different things.”
He smiles and waits until Jesse leaves the room before saying, “I guess this doesn’t offer much for you socially.”
“Oh, that doesn’t bother me,” I say. “I’m not exactly a super social person anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just don’t have a ton of friends.”
He nods thoughtfully. “I understand what you mean. I like to be by myself, too.”
My first impulse is to say no, I don’t like being by myself at all, but maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m actually a loner by choice, preferring my own company.
“Well, I used to be best friends with Jenny Murphy,” I say. “From English class.” The words tumble out, catch me off guard. It’s more than I’ve ever told a teacher, especially a man, but the way he watches me—soft-eyed smile, chin resting on his hand—makes me want to talk, to show myself off.
“Ah,” he says. “The little Queen of the Nile.” When I frown, confused, he explains that he means her bobbed haircut, that it makes her look like Cleopatra, and as he says this, I feel a prick of something in my stomach, like jealousy but meaner.
“I don’t think her hair looks that good,” I say.
Mr. Strane smirks. “So you used to be friends. What changed?”
“She started going out with Tom Hudson.”
He thinks for a moment. “The boy with the sideburns.”
I nod, thinking of how teachers must recognize and categorize us in their minds. I wonder what he might associate with me if someone mentioned Vanessa Wye. The girl with the red hair. That girl who is always alone.
“So you suffered a betrayal,” he says, meaning by Jenny.
It’s something I haven’t considered before and warmth fills my chest at the idea. I suffered. It wasn’t that I drove her away by feeling too much or getting too attached. No, I was wronged.
He gets up and walks to the chalkboard, starts erasing the notes left over from class. “What made you want to try out the club? Weak spot on your résumé?”
I nod; it seems ok to be honest with him. “Mrs. Antonova said I should. I do like to write, though.”
“What do you write?”
“Poems, mostly. They’re not good or anything.”
Mr. Strane smiles over his shoulder in a way that is somehow both kind and condescending. “I’d like to read some of your work.”
My brain catches on the way he says “your work,” as though the things I write are worth taking seriously. “Sure,” I say. “If you really want to.”
“I do want to,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
At that, I feel my face flush. My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.
Mr. Strane sets the eraser on the chalk rail and contemplates me from across the room. He slips his hands into his pockets, looks me up and down.
“That’s a nice dress,” he says. “I like your style.”
I mumble thank you, manners instilled so deep they’re reflexive, and look down at my dress. It’s hunter-green jersey, vaguely A-line but mostly shapeless, and ends above the knee. It’s not stylish; I only wear it because I like the contrast in color against my hair. It seems strange for a middle-aged man to notice girl clothes. My dad barely knows the difference between a dress and a skirt.
Mr. Strane turns back to the chalkboard and starts erasing again even though it’s already clean. It almost seems like he’s embarrassed, and part of me wants to thank him again, sincerely this time. Thank you very much, I could say. No one has ever said that to me before. I wait for him to turn back around, but he keeps swiping the eraser back and forth, cloudy streaks across a green expanse.
Then, as I edge toward the doorway, he says, “I hope I see you again on Thursday.”
“Oh, sure,” I say. “You will.”
So I go again on Thursday, and the next Tuesday, and the next Thursday. I become an official member of the club. It takes Jesse and me longer than expected to finish choosing pieces for the lit journal, mostly because I’m so indecisive, going back and changing my vote multiple times. Meanwhile Jesse’s judgment is swift and ruthless, his pen slicing across the page. When I ask him how he can decide so quickly, he says it should be obvious from the first line if something is good or not. One Thursday, Mr. Strane disappears into the office behind his classroom and comes out with a stack of back issues so we can understand what the journal is supposed to look like, even though Jesse was the editor last year so of course he already knows. Thumbing through an issue, I see Jesse’s name listed in the table of contents under “Fiction.”
“Hey, there’s you,” I say.
At the sight of it, he groans. “Don’t read it in front of me, please.”
“Why not?” I skim the first page.
“Because I don’t want you to.”
I slip the issue into my backpack and forget about it until after dinner, when I’m drowning in incomprehensible geometry homework, eager for a distraction. I take the journal and turn to his story, read it twice. It’s good, really good, better than anything I’ve ever written, better than any of the submissions we read for the journal. When I try to tell him thi
s at the next club meeting, he cuts me off. “Writing isn’t really my thing anymore,” he says.
Another afternoon, Mr. Strane shows us how to use the new publishing software to format the issue. Jesse and I sit side by side at the computer while Mr. Strane stands behind us, watching and correcting. At one point when I make a mistake, he reaches down and guides the mouse for me, his hand so big it covers mine completely. His touch makes my whole body go hot. When I make another mistake, he does it again, this time squeezing my hand a little, as though to reassure me that I’ll get the hang of it, but he doesn’t do the same to Jesse, not even when he accidentally x-es out without saving and Mr. Strane has to explain the steps all over again.
Late September arrives and for a week the weather is perfect, sunny and cool. Each morning the leaves are brighter, turning the rolling mountains around Norumbega into a mess of color. Campus looks like it did in the brochure I obsessed over as I filled out my Browick application—students in sweaters, the lawns a brilliant green, golden hour setting white clapboard aglow. I should enjoy it, but instead the weather makes me restless, panicked. After classes I’m unable to settle down, moving from the library to the Gould common area to my dorm room and back to the library. Everywhere makes me antsy to be someplace else.
One afternoon I loop through campus three times, unsatisfied with all the places I try—the library too dark, my messy dorm room too depressing, everywhere else crowded with people studying in groups that only highlight me being alone, always alone—before I force myself to stop at the grassy slope behind the humanities building. Calm down, breathe.
I lean against the solitary maple tree that my eyes drift to during English class and touch the back of my hand to my hot cheeks. I’m so worked up I’m sweating, and it’s only fifty degrees.
This is fine, I think. Just work here and calm down.
My Dark Vanessa Page 3