Usually, I never go to the dances. Everything about them makes me cringe—the bad music, the embarrassing DJ with his goatee and frosted tips, the kids pretending not to stare at the couples grinding against each other. I’m forcing myself to suffer through this one because it’s been a week. A whole week since Mr. Strane touched me, since he put his hand on my leg and told me he could tell we were similar, two people who like dark things. Since then? Nothing. When I spoke in class, his eyes darted to the table like he couldn’t bear to look at me. During creative writing club he gathered his things and left Jesse and me alone (“Department meeting,” he explained, but if it was a department meeting, why did he need his coat and everything in his briefcase?), and later when I sought him out during faculty service hour, his door was closed, the classroom dark behind textured glass.
So I’m impatient, maybe even desperate. I want something to happen and that seems more likely at an event like this where boundaries are temporarily blurred, students and teachers thrust together in a dimly lit room. I don’t really care what the something else might be—another touch, a compliment. It doesn’t matter so long as it tells me what he wants, what this is, if it’s anything at all.
I eat a fun-size candy bar in tiny bites and watch the couples dance to a slow song, swaying around the floor like bottles in a pool of water. At one point, Jenny strides across the room wearing a satin dress that vaguely resembles a kimono, chopsticks shoved through her nubby ponytail. For a moment she seems to be headed straight for me and I freeze, chocolate melting on my tongue, but then Tom emerges from behind her wearing his normal clothes, jeans and a Beck T-shirt, not even attempting a costume. He touches her shoulder; Jenny jerks away. The music is too loud to eavesdrop, but it’s obvious they’re fighting and that it’s bad. Jenny’s chin wobbles, her eyes screw shut. When Tom touches his fingers to her arm, she plants a hand flat on his chest and shoves him so strongly he stumbles backward. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen them fight.
I’m so fixated that I almost don’t notice Mr. Strane duck out the double doors. I almost let him get away.
When I step outside, the night is pitch black, no moon and close to freezing. The sounds from the dance muffle to a heartbeat bass line and faraway vocals as the door clicks shut behind me. I look around; my arms break into goose bumps as my eyes search for him but find only the shadows of trees, the empty campus green. I’m about to admit defeat and go back inside when a figure steps out from under the shadow cast by a spruce tree: Mr. Strane in a down vest, a flannel shirt, and jeans, an unlit cigarette between his fingers.
I don’t move, unsure what to do. I sense he’s embarrassed to be seen with the cigarette and my mind takes over—I imagine him smoking in secret, like how my dad does in the evenings down by the lakeshore; I imagine he wants to quit and sees his inability to do so as a weakness. He’s ashamed of it.
But even if he’s ashamed, I think, he could have stayed hidden. He could have let me leave.
He twirls the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “You caught me.”
“I thought you were leaving,” I say. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
He pulls a lighter from his pocket and turns it over in his palm a few times. His eyes stay on me. With a sudden clarity, I think, Something’s going to happen, and as the certainty of this settles over me, my heart slows, my shoulders drop.
He lights the cigarette and gestures for me to follow him back under the tree. It’s enormous, probably the biggest on campus, its lowest limbs still far above our heads. At first, it’s so dark all I can see is the red ember from the cigarette as it moves up to his mouth. My eyes adjust and he appears, as do the boughs overhead, the orange-dead needle carpet beneath our feet.
“Don’t smoke,” Mr. Strane says. “It’s a nasty habit.” He exhales and the cigarette smell fills my head. We’re standing about five feet apart. It feels so dangerous it’s strange to think we’ve been closer plenty of times before.
“But it must feel good,” I say. “Otherwise why do it?”
He laughs, takes another drag. “I guess you’re right.” Looking me over, he notices my costume for the first time. “Well, look at you. Little pussy cat.”
I laugh from the shock of hearing him say that word, even if he isn’t using it in the sex way. But he doesn’t laugh. He only stares at me, the cigarette smoking in his hand.
“You know what I’d like to do right now?” he asks. His words flow together more than usual and he sways as he points the cigarette at me. “I’d like to find you a big bed, tuck you in, and kiss you good night.”
For a second, my brain short-circuits entirely and I’m as good as dead. Moments of nothing pass, a static screen, a wall of noise. Then I come roaring back to life with a harsh, choked sound—not quite a laugh, not quite a cry.
A door opens from inside the dining hall and music spills out from the dance. Over that, a woman’s voice calls, “Jake?”
The moment sputters. Mr. Strane turns and hurries toward the voice, throwing down his cigarette without stamping it out. I watch the smoke rise from the fallen needles as he strides back to the doors, to Ms. Thompson.
“Just taking a bit of a breather,” he says to her. Together, they slip back inside. I’m hidden by the tree, like he was when I first came outside. She didn’t see me.
I stare down at the smoking cigarette, consider picking it up and bringing it to my lips, but instead grind it out with my heel. I return to the dance, find Deanna Perkins and Lucy Summers swigging from a Nalgene bottle as they hold a running commentary on everyone’s costumes. Strane stands only a few feet away beside Ms. Thompson, his eyes locked on her. Jenny and Tom stand close together on the periphery of the dance floor, their fight resolved. She winds her arm around his shoulders, nuzzles her face into his neck. It’s a gesture so intimate and adult, I instinctively look away.
Whatever they have in the Nalgene bottle sloshes around as Deanna and Lucy pass it back and forth. Deanna, taking a swallow, notices my stare. “What?”
“Let me have some,” I say.
Lucy reaches for the bottle. “Sorry, limited supplies.”
“I’ll tell if you don’t let me.”
“Shut up.”
Deanna waves her hand. “Let her have a drink.”
Lucy sighs, holds out the bottle. “You can have a sip.”
The alcohol burns my throat worse than I expected and I start to cough, like a cliché. Deanna and Lucy don’t even try to hide their laughs. Thrusting the bottle back at them, I march out of the dining hall, willing Mr. Strane to notice, to understand why I’m angry and what I want. I wait outside to see if he’ll come after me but he doesn’t—of course he doesn’t.
Back in Gould, the dorm is quiet, empty. Every door is closed, everyone still at the dance.
I stare down Ms. Thompson’s apartment door at the far end of the hall. If she hadn’t called to him, something would have happened. He said he wanted to kiss me; maybe he would have done it. Still in my costume, I walk toward Ms. Thompson’s door. Mr. Strane is probably making her laugh right this moment. At the end of the night, they’ll probably go to his house and have sex. Maybe he’ll even tell her about me, how I followed him outside and he said that stuff just to be nice. She has a crush on you, Ms. Thompson will say, teasing. As though it’s all in my head, a narrative sprung without a source.
I grab the marker attached to her dry erase board. Notes from the previous week are still scribbled there: the date and time of a dorm meeting, an open invitation to a spaghetti dinner in her apartment. With one swipe of my hand, I erase the notes and write BITCH in big bold letters that take up the whole board.
The first snow comes that night after the dance and covers campus in a heavy four inches. On Saturday morning Ms. Thompson calls us all into the common room and tries to find out who wrote bitch on her door. “I’m not mad,” she assures us. “Just confused.”
My heart thumps in my ears and I sit with my hands clasped in my lap,
willing my cheeks not to burn.
After a few minutes of sitting in silence, she gives up. “We can let it go,” she says. “But not if it happens again. Ok?”
She nods, prompting us to say ok. On my way back upstairs I look over my shoulder and see her standing in the middle of the empty room, rubbing her face with both hands.
Sunday afternoon I approach her door, my eyes lingering on the whiteboard, bitch still faintly visible. I feel guilty—not enough to admit what I did, but enough to want to do something nice. When Ms. Thompson opens the door, she’s in sweatpants and a hooded Browick sweatshirt, her hair pulled back, no makeup on her face, acne scars on her cheeks. I wonder if Mr. Strane has ever seen her this way.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Can I take Mya for a walk?”
“Oh god, she’d love that.” She calls over her shoulder, but the husky is already barreling toward me, ears pricked and blue eyes dilated, propelled by the sound of the word walk.
Ms. Thompson reminds me that it will be dark soon as I slide Mya’s harness over her head and clip the leash. “We won’t go far,” I say.
“And don’t let her run.”
“I know, I know.” Last time I took Mya for a walk, I let her off-leash to play and she ran straight into the garden behind the arts building and rolled in fertilizer.
The temperature rose overnight to fifty degrees and the snow is already gone, leaving the ground spongy and slick. We walk the trail that winds around the sports fields, and I let the leash out long so Mya can sniff and romp around, darting from side to side. I love Mya; she’s the most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen, her fur so thick my fingers disappear to the second knuckle when I give her back a good scritch. Mostly, though, I love her because she’s difficult. Bossy. If she doesn’t want to do something, she’ll talk back at you in a grumbly howl. Ms. Thompson says I must have a special gift with dogs because Mya doesn’t really like anyone except me. Dogs are easy to win over, though, way easier than people. For a dog to love you, all you have to do is keep some treats in your pocket and scratch behind their ears or at the base of their tail. When they want to be left alone, they don’t play games; they let you know.
At the soccer field, the trail forks into three smaller paths. One leads back to campus, the other into the woods, and the third downtown. Even though I promised Ms. Thompson I’d stay close, I take the third path.
The storefronts downtown are decorated for the season with fake foliage and cornucopias, and the bakery has already hung Christmas lights. As Mya pulls me along, I check my reflection in every window, a two-second glimpse of my hair fanning out from my face, possibly beautiful, though it seems equally possible I might be ugly. When we get to the public library, I stop. Impatient, Mya looks back at me, flashing the whites of her blue eyes as I stand staring at the house across the street. His house—that has to be it. It’s smaller than I imagined it to be, with grayed cedar shingles and a dark blue door. Mya sidles up beside me, bumps her head against my legs. Let’s go.
This is, of course, the whole reason I came this way, why I wanted to go for a walk in the first place and asked Ms. Thompson if I could borrow the dog. I’d imagined myself passing by as he happened to be outside. He would see me and call me over, ask why I was walking Ms. Thompson’s dog. We would talk a bit, standing on the strip of front lawn, and then he’d invite me inside. There the fantasy fizzles out, because what we do after that depends on what he wants, and I have no idea what he wants.
But he isn’t outside and it doesn’t look like he’s inside, either. The windows are dark, no car in the driveway. He’s somewhere else, living a life that I know infuriatingly little about.
I lead Mya to the top of the library steps. We’re hidden there but still have a view of the street. I sit feeding her bacon bits I stole from the dining hall salad bar until the sun blazes orange and starts to set. Maybe he wouldn’t even want me to come inside because of the dog. I forgot he said he doesn’t like them. But he’d have to at least pretend to like Mya if he’s doing whatever with Ms. Thompson, otherwise how could she live with herself? It would be a real betrayal to date someone who hated your dog.
It’s nearly dark when a boxy blue station wagon turns into the driveway. The engine cuts, the driver’s door opens, and Mr. Strane emerges in jeans and the same flannel shirt he wore at the Halloween dance on Friday. Holding my breath, I watch him haul grocery bags from the back of the car up the front steps. At the door, he fumbles with his keys, and Mya lets out an indignant whine for more treats. I give her a whole handful and she eats them as fast as she can, her tongue lapping my palm while I watch the windows of the little saltbox house light up as Mr. Strane moves through the rooms.
After class on Monday, I take my time leaving. Once everyone else is gone, I swing my backpack onto one shoulder and say in my most nonchalant voice, “You live across from the public library, right?”
From behind his desk, Mr. Strane looks at me in surprise. “How do you know that?” he asks.
“You mentioned it once.”
He studies me, and the longer he does, the harder it is to keep up the nonchalant act. I purse my lips together, try to hold my frown.
“I don’t remember that,” he says.
“Well, you did. How else would I know?” My voice sounds harsh, angry, and I can tell he’s a little taken aback. Mostly, though, he looks amused, like he thinks my frustration is cute. “I might’ve gone there,” I add. “You know, to scope it out.”
“I see.”
“Are you mad?”
“Not at all. I’m flattered.”
“I saw you unloading groceries from your car.”
“You did? When?”
“Yesterday.”
“You were watching me.”
I nod.
“You should have made yourself known and said hello.”
My eyes narrow. That isn’t what I expected him to say. “What if someone saw me?”
He smiles, cocks his head. “Why would it matter if someone saw you saying hello to me?”
I clench my jaw and breathe hard through my nose. His innocence feels put on, like he’s playing with me by playing dumb.
Still smiling, he leans back in his chair, and him doing that—leaning back, crossing his arms, looking me up and down as though I’m entertaining, just something to look at—makes anger flare up inside me, so sudden and strong I ball my hands into fists to stop from screaming, lunging forward, grabbing the Harvard mug off his desk and hurling it at his face.
I turn on my heel, stomp out of the room and down the hallway. I’m furious the whole way back to Gould, but once I’m in my room, the anger disappears and all that’s left is the dull-ache desire for meaning I’ve had for weeks now. He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.
* * *
My midsemester geometry grade is a D-plus. All eyes turn on me when Mrs. Antonova announces this during our monthly advisee meeting at the Italian restaurant. At first I don’t realize she’s talking to me; my mind drifts as I methodically tear apart a piece of bread and roll it back into dough between my fingers.
“Vanessa,” she says, rapping her knuckles against the table. “D-plus.”
I look up and notice the stares, Mrs. Antonova holding a piece of paper, her own faculty feedback. “Then I guess there’s nowhere for me to go but up,” I say.
Mrs. Antonova stares at me over the top of her glasses. “You could still go down,” she says. “You could fail.”
“I won’t fail.”
“You need a plan of action, a tutor. We’ll get you one.”
I glower down at the table as she moves on to the next advisee, my stomach tight at the thought of a tutor, because tutor sessions meet during faculty service hour, which would mean less time with Mr. Strane. Kyle Guinn flashes me a sympathetic smile after he’s given similar news about his Spanish gr
ade, and I sink so low in my chair my chin practically rests on the table.
When I get back to campus, the Gould common room is crowded, the TV playing election results. I squeeze onto one of the couches and watch the states get sorted into two columns as the polls close. “Vermont for Gore,” the news anchor says. “Kentucky for Bush.” At one point, when Ralph Nader flashes on-screen, Deanna and Lucy start to clap, and when Bush comes on, everybody boos. It looks like a sure thing for Gore until right before ten, when they announce they’re putting Florida back in the “too close to call” column, and I get so fed up with the entire thing I give up and go to bed.
At first everyone jokes about the election never ending, but it stops being funny when the Florida recount goes into full swing. Mr. Sheldon spends most days with his feet propped up on his desk, but now he springs to life, drawing sprawling webs on the chalkboard meant to illustrate the many ways democracy can fail. During one class he lectures us on all the different kinds of chads—hanging, fat, pregnant—while we try not to laugh and shoot looks at Chad Gagnon.
Meanwhile in American lit, we read A River Runs Through It and Mr. Strane tells us his own stories of growing up in Montana—ranches and real-life cowboys, dogs eaten by grizzlies, mountains so big they block out the sun. I try to imagine him as a boy, but I can’t even picture what he’d look like without a beard. After A River Runs Through It, we start on Robert Frost and Mr. Strane recites “The Road Not Taken” from memory. He says we shouldn’t feel uplifted by the poem, that Frost’s message is widely misunderstood. The poem isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice. He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.
My Dark Vanessa Page 7