My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  I choose to think of this as the lull in my story, a period of banishment that tests my loyalties but will ultimately make me stronger. I’ve accepted that I cannot contact Strane, at least not any time soon. Even if my parents weren’t checking the caller ID and phone bill, I imagine lines being tapped, emails monitored. One phone call from me and he could be fired. The cops could show up at his door. It’s strange to think of myself as that dangerous, but look at what already happened—I barely opened my mouth and brought us to the brink of disaster.

  All I can do is suffer through. Paddle the canoe into the middle of the lake and let it drift back to shore, read Lolita for the millionth time and scrutinize Strane’s faded annotations. Stare down page 140, when Humbert and Lo are in the car the morning after they have sex for the first time, where a line is underlined in what looks like fresher ink: “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Think of Strane driving me back to campus after the first night at his house, how closely he studied me when he asked if I was ok. Scrawl in my notebook, “Jailbait” means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch.

  I dread August, because once the Browick move-in date passes, I can no longer pretend there’s a chance this will fix itself, that I might wake up that morning to the truck packed, my parents crying out, “Surprise! It’s all been worked out. Of course you’re going back!” On the morning of move-in day, I wake to an empty house, my parents both at work. A note on the kitchen counter tells me to vacuum, do the dishes, brush Babe, water the tomato and zucchini plants. Still in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, I throw on sneakers and take off into the woods. I run straight up the bluff, underbrush scraping my shins. When I reach the top, gasping for breath, I look out over the lake, the mountain, that long, low whale’s back rising from the earth. The endless woods interrupted only by a wisp of highway, big rigs gliding like toys on a track. I think of stepping into an empty dorm room, the sun draped across a bare mattress, finding someone else’s initials carved on the windowsill. I imagine a new class taking their seats around the seminar table while Strane looks on, thinking of me.

  My new high school is a long one-story building that was hurriedly built in the sixties to accommodate all the baby boomers and hasn’t been updated since. It shares a parking lot with a strip mall that has a discount grocery store, a laundromat, a telemarketing center where people sell credit cards, and a diner that still allows people to smoke.

  It’s the opposite of Browick in every possible way. Carpeted classrooms, pep rallies, kids in T-shirts and jeans, voc classes, cafeteria trays of chicken nuggets and slab pizza, classrooms so crowded they can’t fit another desk. On the drive in that morning, Mom says it’s good I’m starting on the first day of a new school year, that I’ll blend right in, but as I walk the hallways it’s clear I’ve been marked. Kids I recognize from middle school avert their eyes, while others openly stare. In Honors French 4, the textbook full of lessons I’ve already learned, two boys in the row beside me whisper about a new girl they’ve heard about, a junior, a transfer, a slut who boned a teacher.

  At first, I can only blink blindly down at my textbook. Boned?

  Then rage rushes through me. Because these boys have no idea the girl they’re talking about is sitting next to them, because I have only two choices and neither is fair—sit and say nothing, or cause a scene and out myself. Maybe the boys assume I’m a senior like them, but more likely is that it doesn’t even cross their minds that I’m the girl in question. From the outside, I must seem ordinary, barefaced and dressed in size ten corduroys. You? they’d ask in disbelief, unable to reconcile me with the slut they had imagined.

  On my fourth day, two girls fall into step beside me on the way to the cafeteria. One I know from middle school, Jade Reynolds. Her brown hair is bleached a brassy orange, and she’s ditched the wide-leg jeans and barbell necklaces she used to wear but kept the kohl-rimmed eyes. The other girl, Charley, I recognize from my chemistry class. She’s tall, smells of cigarettes, has hair so bleached it’s almost white. Her hooked nose makes her eyes look slightly crossed, like a Siamese cat.

  Jade smiles at me as we walk, a smile that’s less about being nice and more about peering straight into me. “Vanessa, hi,” she says brightly, drawing out her words. “Do you want to eat with us?”

  My shoulders hunch reflexively. I shake my head, sensing a trap. “That’s ok.”

  Jade ducks her head. “Are you sure?” She keeps smiling that strange searching smile.

  “Come on,” Charley says, her voice rough. “Nobody wants to eat alone.”

  In the cafeteria, the girls head straight to a table in the corner. I barely sit down before Jade leans across the table, her brown eyes wide.

  “So,” she says. “Why did you transfer here?”

  “I didn’t like it,” I say. “Boarding school was too expensive.”

  Jade and Charley exchange a look.

  “We heard you had sex with a teacher,” Jade says.

  In a way, it’s a relief to hear the question leveled at me directly—a relief, too, to imagine the story snaking its way across the state, refusing to be left behind. My parents can pretend it never happened but it did, it did.

  “Was he hot?” Charley asks. “I’d fuck a hot teacher.”

  They watch me curiously as I struggle to answer. Like with the boys in French class, I know what they imagine is way off—a handsome young teacher, like something out of a movie. I wonder what they’d think of me if they saw Strane with his belly and wire-framed glasses.

  “So you really did?” Jade asks, a note of incredulity in her voice. She isn’t convinced. I lift my shoulders, not quite affirmation but not a denial, and Charley nods like she understands.

  The girls share a package of peanut butter crackers Jade produces from her backpack, both pulling the crackers apart and scraping the peanut butter off with their teeth. Their eyes follow the teacher circling the cafeteria. When the teacher ducks down to talk to a table across the room, Jade and Charley shoot up.

  “Come on,” Charley says. “Bring your backpack.”

  They hurry out of the cafeteria and down the hallway, turn a corner into a smaller wing of the school and then out a door that opens onto a walkway leading to a temporary classroom. They duck under the walkway railing and jump onto the grass below.

  When I hesitate, Charley reaches up and smacks my ankle hard. “Jump before someone sees you.”

  We run across the grass to the parking lot and the strip mall, where people push carts teeming with bags out of the grocery store. A man leaning against an empty taxi watches us as he takes a drag off a cigarette.

  Charley grabs my sleeve and leads me into the grocery store. I drift along, following them through the aisles. The employees eye us. It’s obvious we’re from the high school; our backpacks are dead giveaways. Charley and Jade meander up and down a few aisles before heading for the makeup section.

  “I like this,” Jade says, inspecting the bottom of a lipstick. She holds the tube out to Charley, who flips it over and reads the color name, “Wine with Everything.”

  Jade hands the lipstick to me. “It’s nice,” I say, handing it back.

  “No,” she whispers. “Put it in your pocket.”

  I clasp my hand around the lipstick, realizing what this is all about. In one fluid motion, Charley shoves three bottles of nail polish into her backpack. Jade slips two lipsticks and an eyeliner into her pocket.

  “That’s enough for now,” Charley says.

  I follow them across the store, back toward the doors. When we cut through an empty register lane, I drop the lipstick among the candy bars.

  In a parallel universe, I’m still at Browick. I have another single in Gould, bigger this time, with more natural light. Instead of chemistry, U.S. history, and algebra, I take courses in stellar astronomy, the sociology of rock and roll, the art of math. I
have a directed reading with Strane and we meet in the afternoons, in his office, to talk about the books he tells me to read. Thoughts flow from him straight into me, our brains and bodies connected.

  I dig through my bedroom closet and find the glossy brochures I brought home as an eighth grader who saw galaxies in her future. I cut up the pages and glue them on the cover of my journal—dining hall tables set with tablecloths for parents’ visiting weekend, students bent over books in the library, the autumn campus awash in golden light and fiery leaves, maple red. An L.L.Bean catalog comes in the mail and I cut that up, too. The men are all stand-ins for Strane, dressed in tweed blazers, flannel shirts, and hiking boots, holding mugs of steaming black coffee. I miss him so much, I exhaust myself from it. I drag myself from class to class, breaking the days down into manageable units. If not hours, then minutes. If I think about how many days lie before me, I end up obsessing over things I know I shouldn’t. Like, maybe being dead isn’t the worst thing. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  On the third week, the Twin Towers fall, and all day at school, we watch the news. Miniature American flags start appearing on cars, pinned to people’s jackets, in convenience stores next to the cash registers. Fox News plays on the TV in the cafeteria, and every evening my parents watch hours of CNN, the same shots of smoke billowing from the towers, George W. with a megaphone at Ground Zero, pundits speculating about where the anthrax letters are coming from. My new English teacher hangs an illustration of a crying bald eagle on the front of her desk, and in the corner of the whiteboard, she writes the words NEVER FORGET. Yet all I can think about is Strane, my own loss. In my notebook, I write, Our country was attacked. It is a tragic day. Close the front cover, open it again and add, And yet all I care about is myself. I am selfish and bad. I hope the words will shame me. They do nothing.

  During lunch, Charley, Jade, and I smoke cigarettes around the back of the strip mall, hidden between two dumpsters piled high with cardboard. Jade wants Charley to skip chemistry so they can go somewhere—the mall, maybe? I don’t know. I’m not really listening. The real reason Jade wants Charley to skip is because she’s jealous, hates that Charley and I have a class together without her. Fifty whole minutes she doesn’t have access to.

  “I can’t skip,” Charley says, flicking her cigarette. There’s a tattoo of a tiny heart on her middle finger—a stick and poke, she said. Her mother’s boyfriend did it. “We have a quiz today. Right, Vanessa?”

  I move my head in a part shake, part nod. I have no idea.

  Jade glares out at the grocery store loading docks, the backed-in eighteen-wheelers delivering food. “Figures,” she mutters.

  “Oh my god, relax.” Charley laughs. “We’ll go after school. God, you’re so fuckin’ uptight.”

  Jade exhales a cloud of smoke, nostrils flared.

  In chemistry, Charley whispers that she’s horny for Will Coviello, wants him so bad she’s willing to give him a blow job and she never gives blow jobs. I hardly hear her because I’m so engrossed in the inside cover of my notebook, where I’ve written out Strane’s schedule from memory. Right now, he’s teaching sophomore English, sitting at the seminar table, someone else in my chair.

  “Isn’t that sad?” Charley asks. “Do you think I’m pathetic?”

  I don’t look up from my notebook. “I think you should do whatever you want with whoever you want.”

  I look ahead to the next class period on Strane’s schedule—a free hour. I picture him in the office, reclined on the tweed sofa, a stack of ungraded homework on his lap, his thoughts drifting to me.

  “See, that’s why I like you,” Charley says. “You’re so chill. We should hang out. Like, for real. Outside of school.”

  I glance up from my notebook.

  “What about Friday? You can come to the bowling alley.”

  “I don’t really like bowling.”

  She rolls her eyes. “We don’t actually bowl.”

  I ask what it is that they do there, but Charley only grins, ducks her head down toward the gas valve, puckers her lips, moves to turn it on. I grab her hand and she laughs, raspy and loud.

  On Friday night, Charley drives all the way out to my house to pick me up, comes inside and introduces herself to my parents. Her hair is pulled back into a neat ponytail and she’s wearing a ring that hides her tattoo.

  She tells my mom she’s had her license for a year, a lie that comes out so smooth, it fools even me. I see my parents exchanging glances, how Mom wrings her hands, but I know they don’t want to tell me I can’t go. At least I’m making friends, starting to fit in.

  Once Charley and I are walking up the driveway, out of earshot, she says, “Christ, you really live out in the fuckin’ boonies.”

  “I know, I hate it.”

  “I would, too. You know, last year I dated a guy who lived out here.” She says his name, but I don’t recognize it. “He was a little older,” she explains.

  Her car squeals as she pulls out of the driveway, and I picture Mom wincing at the sound. “Yeah, sorry,” Charley says, “muffler’s bad.” She drives with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, her window cracked to let out the smoke. She wears gloves with the fingertips cut off, her coat covered in cat hair. She asks me questions about myself, about what I think of different people at school, about having gone to Browick. She says she’s obsessed with the idea of boarding school.

  “Was it crazy?” she asks. “It must’ve been. Full of rich kids, right?”

  “Not everyone was rich.”

  “Were there drugs everywhere?”

  “No,” I say. “It wasn’t like that. It was . . .” I think of the white clapboard campus, the autumn oak trees, the snow banks higher than our heads, the teachers in jeans and flannel shirts—Strane, draped in shadow, as he watched me from behind his desk. I shake my head. “It’s hard to describe.”

  Charley sticks the tip of her cigarette out the window. “Well, you’re lucky. Even if you were only there a couple years. My mom would never be able to swing that.”

  “I had a scholarship,” I say quickly.

  “Yeah, but even then, my mom wouldn’t have let me go. She loves me too much. I mean, letting your kid move away as a freshman? At fourteen? That’s crazy.” She takes a drag, exhales, and adds, “Sorry. I’m sure your mom loves you. It’s just different, I guess, with mine. We’re close. It’s just her and me.”

  I wave her off, say that it’s fine, but what she said stings. Maybe it hurts because it might be true. Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.

  “Will’s supposed to be there tonight,” she says, such a sudden subject change I start to ask Will who, but then remember what she said in chemistry. Will Coviello is so hot, I’ll give him a blow job. Watch me, I’ll do it. I’ve known Will Coviello since I was in kindergarten. He’s a year older, a senior, lives in a big house with a tennis court out front. Girls used to call him Prince William in middle school.

  When we get to the bowling alley, Jade is already there, wearing a satiny camisole without a bra. The bowling alley is dimly lit, with long tables set back from the lanes where a bunch of kids from school sit, their faces recognizable but most of their names out of reach. There’s a sports bar attached to the bowling alley, an open doorway separating the two so jukebox music drifts in, the smell of beer.

  Charley sits next to Jade. “Have you seen Will?” When Jade nods and points toward the doors, Charley takes off so fast she almost knocks over a chair.

  Without Charley around, Jade won’t speak to me. She stares pointedly over my shoulders, refuses to look at me. Her eyeliner cuts across her eyelids into sharp points. I haven’t seen her wear it like that before.

  Men with drinks in their hands wander out of the bar and into the bowling alley, their eyes skimming the dim room. A man in a camo jacket sees our table and gestures to his friend. The other man just shakes his head and holds up his hands, as if to say, I don’t wan
t anything to do with that.

  I watch the man in the jacket come over, notice how he zeroes in on Jade and her slutty top. He pulls up a chair beside her, sets his drink on the table. “Hope you don’t mind if I sit here,” he says. His accent turns here into two syllables. He-yah. “It’s so crowded, there’s nowhere else for me to go.”

  It’s a joke; there are plenty of seats. Jade is supposed to laugh, but she won’t even look over at him. She sits with her back stick straight and arms crossed over her chest. In a tiny voice, she says, “It’s fine.”

  The man isn’t bad looking, despite his grubby hands. He’s who the boys at school will grow up into—thick Maine accent and a pickup truck. “How old are you?” I ask. The question comes out more forceful than I intend, makes me sound accusing, but he doesn’t seem put off. He turns toward me, his attention immediately shifting away from Jade.

  He says to me, “I feel like I should be asking you the same question.”

  “I asked first.”

  He smirks. “I’ll tell you, but I’ll make you work for it. I graduated high school in nineteen eighty-three.”

  I think for a moment; Strane graduated high school in 1976. “You’re thirty-six.”

  The man raises his eyebrows, sips his drink. “You disgusted?”

  “Why would I be disgusted?”

  “Because thirty-six is old.” He laughs. “How old are you?”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  He looks me over. “Eighteen.”

  “Sixteen.”

  He laughs again, shakes his head. “Christ.”

  “Is that bad?” It’s a stupid question and I know it. Of course it’s bad. The badness of it is written all over his face. I flick my eyes over to Jade and she stares at me as though she’s never seen me before, like she has no idea who I am.

  A senior girl at the other end of the table leans toward us. “Hey, can I have a sip of your drink?” she asks. The man grimaces a little, a small show of acknowledgment that it’s wrong, but slides the glass down the table. The girl takes one sip and then shrieks out a giggle, as though instantly drunk.