“Ok, ok.” The man reaches for his drink. “I don’t wanna get kicked out.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Craig.” He nudges the glass toward me. “You want a taste?”
“What is it?”
“Whiskey and Coke.”
I reach for it. “I love whiskey.”
“And what’s your name, sixteen-year-old-who-loves-whiskey?”
I shake my hair back from my face. “Vanessa.” I say it with a sigh, as though I’m bored to tears, as though a fire isn’t burning in me. I wonder if this counts as cheating, how angry Strane would be if he walked in and saw this scene.
Charley comes back over, her face flushed, hair messed up. She takes a long swallow from Jade’s can of soda.
“What happened?” Jade asks.
Charley waves her hand; she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Let’s get out of here. I want to go home and pass out.” She looks at me, suddenly remembering. “Shit, I need to drive you home.”
Craig watches intently. “You need a ride?” he asks me.
I balk, my limbs tingling.
“Who are you?” Charley asks.
“I’m Craig.” He holds his hand out for her to shake. Charley just stares him down.
“Right.” She looks to me. “You’re not leaving with him. I’ll drive you home.”
I give Craig a sheepish smile and try not to look too relieved.
“Does she always tell you what to do?” he asks. I shake my head and he leans in toward me. “So what if I wanted to talk to you sometime? How would I do that?”
He wants a phone number, but I know my parents would probably call the police at the sound of his voice. “Do you have Instant Messenger?”
“Like AOL? Sure, I’ve got that.”
Charley watches as I fish a pen from the bottom of my bag and write my screen name on the palm of his hand. “You really like old guys, don’t you?” she asks as we walk out the door. “Sorry if I cock-blocked you. I didn’t think you really wanted to let him drive you home.”
“I didn’t. I just like the attention. He’s obviously a loser.”
She laughs, opens her car door and gets inside, leans across and unlocks the passenger door. “You know, you’re surprisingly screwed up.”
On the drive to my house, Charley plays the same Missy Elliott song over and over, the dashboard glowing her face blue as she raps along: “Ain’t no shame, ladies, do your thing / just make sure you’re ahead of the game.”
By Monday everyone knows Charley gave Will a blow job, but he won’t speak to her now and Jade hears from Ben Sargent that Will called Charley white trash.
“Men are shit,” Charley says as we smoke cigarettes behind the grocery store, huddled between the dumpsters. Jade nods in agreement and I do, too, but only for show. I stayed up late Saturday and Sunday chatting with Craig, and my head still rings from all the compliments he gave me. I’m so pretty, so hot, unbelievably sexy. Since he met me Friday night, I’m the only thing he’s thought about. He’ll do anything to see me again.
Charley says that men are shit, but really she means boys. She wipes away tears before they have a chance to fall, and I know she’s mad and that it must hurt like hell, but a part of me can’t help but think: what did she expect?
* * *
Craig is nothing like Strane. He’s a veteran, was in Desert Storm, and now works construction. He doesn’t read, didn’t go to college, and doesn’t have anything to say when I try to talk about the things I care about. The worst thing about him is how much he likes guns—not just hunting rifles but handguns. When I say I think guns are idiotic, he writes, You won’t think that when someone breaks into your bedroom in the middle of the night. Being armed will probably seem pretty smart then.
Who’s going to break into my bedroom? I shoot back. You?
Maybe.
With Craig, it’s only chatting online, which makes it ok even when he acts like a creep. I haven’t seen him since that night at the bowling alley, and I’m not in any rush to, but he says he wants to see me. He talks all the time about how he wants to take me out.
Where would we even go? I ask, like I’m stupid. Whenever the conversation veers off in a direction I don’t like, I play dumb, which means I play dumb so often, he thinks I actually am.
What do you mean, where? Craig writes. To the movies, dinner. Haven’t you ever been on a date before?
Ok, but I’m sixteen.
You could pass for eighteen.
He doesn’t understand how this works, doesn’t get that I don’t want to pass for eighteen and that I have zero interest in going to the movies as though he were a boy my own age.
The weather cools to a raw gray. The leaves change and fall, the woods turn sparse with skeletal trees. I learn things about myself: that if I limit myself to five hours of sleep, I’m too tired to care what happens around me; if I wait until dinnertime to eat anything, hunger pains drown out any other feelings. Christmas comes and goes, another new year; the TV news still screams about anthrax and war. At school, the rumors about me have long died down. My parents stop locking the cordless phone in their bedroom every night.
I keep chatting with Craig, but his compliments turn stale and the feeling he gave me when I first met him dries up. Now when we chat, all I can think about is what Strane would think of him and what Strane would think of me for spending my time talking to him.
Craig207: Can I admit something? I had a one-night stand on Saturday.
dark_vanessa: why are you telling me this?
Craig207: Because I think you should know that I thought about you the whole time.
dark_vanessa: hmmm
Craig207: I pretended she was you.
Craig207: So you still haven’t heard from that teacher?
dark_vanessa: it’s not safe for us to talk.
Craig207: You talk to me. How is that different?
dark_vanessa: you and I haven’t done anything. we’re just talking.
Craig207: You know I want to do more than talk.
Craig207: He’s really the only guy you’ve been with?
Craig207: Hello? You there?
Craig207: Look, I’ve been pretty patient, but I’m reaching my breaking point. I’ve had it with this endless talking.
Craig207: When can I see you?
dark_vanessa: um not sure. maybe next week?
Craig207: You said next week is February break.
dark_vanessa: oh yeah. I dunno. it’s hard.
Craig207: It doesn’t have to be hard. We can make this happen tomorrow.
Craig207: I work half a mile away from the high school. I’ll pick you up.
dark_vanessa: that wouldn’t work.
Craig207: It will work. I’ll prove it.
dark_vanessa: what does that mean?
Craig207: You’ll see
dark_vanessa: what are you saying???
Craig207: You get out around 2, right? That’s usually when I see all the buses lining up out front.
dark_vanessa: what are you going to do just show up or something?
Craig207: You’ll see then how easy it is
dark_vanessa: please do not do that.
Craig207: You don’t like the idea that the man you’ve been toying with might finally take some action?
dark_vanessa: I’m serious
Craig207: See ya
I block his screen name, delete all our chats and emails, and fake sick the next day, grateful that at least I never told him exactly where I live so there’s no chance he’ll find me at home. When I return to school, I carry my house key so it sticks out between my fingers as I walk from the school doors to the bus. I imagine him grabbing me from behind, forcing me into his truck, and then who knows what. Rape and murder me, probably. Carry my corpse to the movies so we can finally have that stupid date he always went on about. After a week passes and nothing happens, I stop holding my key like a weapon and unblock his screen name to see if he’ll message me. He
doesn’t. He’s gone. I tell myself I’m relieved.
In early March, my copy of Lolita goes missing from my nightstand. I tear my room apart searching for it; the thought of losing it has me almost out of my mind with panic. It wasn’t just my copy; it was Strane’s—his notes in the margins, traces of him on the pages.
I don’t really believe my parents took it, but I don’t know how else it could have disappeared. Downstairs, Mom sits alone at the dining room table. It’s covered in bills, a calculator with a spool of paper. Dad’s in town buying sugaring supplies for the upcoming weekends of boiling down maple sap on the woodstove, filling the house with sweet steam.
“Did you go in my room?” I ask.
She looks up from the calculator, her face serene.
“Something’s missing,” I say. “Did you take it?”
“What is it that’s missing?” she asks.
I take a breath. “A book.”
She blinks, looks back down to the bills. “What book?”
I clench my jaw; my stomach tightens. It feels like she wants to see if I’ll say it. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “It was mine. You have no right to take it.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I didn’t take anything from your room.”
My heart pounds as I watch her shuffle the papers. She writes down a list of numbers and then punches those numbers into the calculator. When a sum appears, she sighs.
“You think you’re protecting me but it’s too late,” I say.
She looks up, her eyes sharp, a crack in the cool expression.
“Maybe some of this was your fault,” I say. “Did you ever consider that?”
“I’m not getting into this with you right now,” she says.
“Most mothers don’t let their kid move out at fourteen. You realize that, right?”
“You didn’t move out,” she says sharply. “You went away to school.”
“Well, all my friends think it’s weird that you let me do that,” I say. “Most mothers love their kids too much to send them away, but not you I guess.”
She stares at me, her face drains of color and the next moment it’s swallowed by a flush. Boiling red, flared nostrils, maybe the first time I’ve ever seen in her that kind of anger. For a moment I imagine her leaping up from the table and lunging at me, her hands around my neck.
“You begged us to let you go there,” she says, her voice shaking from the effort to remain calm.
“I didn’t beg.”
“You gave us a goddamn presentation about it.”
I shake my head. “You’re exaggerating,” I say, though she’s not. I did give a presentation; I did beg.
“You can’t do that,” she says. “You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”
“What does that mean?”
She takes a breath as though to speak. Then she exhales, lets it go. She stands, moves into the kitchen—to get away from me, I know, but I follow her. A few steps behind, I ask again, “What does that mean? Mom, what is that supposed to mean?” To drown me out, she turns the water on full blast and clangs the dishes in the sink, but I don’t stop. The question keeps coming out of me, berating and outside my control, outside myself.
The plate in her hands slips, or maybe it’s slammed on purpose. Either way, it breaks—shards into the sink. I go quiet, my hands tingling as though I’m the one who shattered the plate.
“You lied to me, Vanessa,” she says. Her hand, red from the hot water and slick with soap, turns off the tap and then balls into a fist. Water darkens her shirt as she pounds that fist against her own heart. “You told me you had a boyfriend. You sat there and you lied to me and you let me think . . .”
She trails off and clamps the wet hand over her eyes, like she can’t bear to remember it. That drive back to Browick, her saying, All I care about is that he’s nice to you. Asking me if I was having sex, if I needed to go on the Pill. First love is so special, she said. You’ll never forget it.
Again she says, “You lied to me.”
She waits, expecting an apology. I let the words hang in the air between us. I feel emptied out and stripped bare, but I don’t feel sorry, not for anything.
She’s right; I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane—and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.
“I never imagined you being capable of that,” she says.
I lift my shoulders; my voice comes out like a croak. “Maybe you don’t really know me.”
She blinks, registering both what I said and what I haven’t. “Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Maybe I don’t.”
Wiping her hands, she leaves the sink of dirty dishes, the broken plate. On her way out of the kitchen she pauses in the doorway. “You know, sometimes I’m ashamed that you’re my kid,” she says.
I stand for a while in the middle of the kitchen, my ears following the groan of the stairs as she climbs, my parents’ bedroom door opening and closing, her footsteps directly above me, the creak of the metal frame as she gets into bed. The walls and floors here are so thin, the house so cheaply built, you can hear anything if you listen hard enough, a constant threat of exposure.
I plunge my hand into the sink and grope blindly for pieces of the broken plate, not caring if I slice myself open. I leave the shards lined up on the counter, dripping water and soap suds. Later, when I’m lying in my own bed still checking myself for hurt—was it so bad, what she said to me? it feels worse than what I deserved—she tosses the shards into the trash and I hear the clatter of ceramic from all the way up in my attic bedroom. The next day I find Lolita back on my bookshelf.
Charley’s mom gets a job in New Hampshire, the third time they’ve moved in four years. On her last day at school, she sneaks beers in her backpack and we drink them behind the grocery store, our burps echoing against the dumpsters. After school, Charley gives me a ride home, still buzzed, running every red light on our way out of town while I laugh and lean my head against the window, thinking, If this is how I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I say as she turns onto the lake road. “I won’t have any friends without you.”
“There’s Jade,” she says, peering at the dark road, trying to avoid the potholes.
“Ugh, no thanks. She’s the fuckin’ worst.” My bluntness surprises me; I’ve never shit-talked Jade to Charley before, but what does it matter now?
Charley smirks. “Yeah, she can be. And she does kind of hate you.” She stops the car at the top of my driveway. “I’d come in, but I don’t want your parents to smell beer on me. Though you probably smell like it, too.”
“Wait a sec.” I dig through my backpack for the toothpaste I began carrying around once I started smoking cigarettes. I suck a little bit into my mouth, swish it around.
“Look at you.” Charley laughs. “Surprisingly screwed up and brilliant.”
I hug her for a long time and, in my giddiness, want to kiss her but control the urge, force myself to climb out of the car. Before I shut the door, I duck down and say, “Hey, thanks for not letting me leave with that guy at the bowling alley.”
She frowns, trying to remember. Her eyebrows lift. “Oh, right! No problem. He was clearly going to murder you.”
As she backs out of the driveway, she rolls down the window and calls, “Keep in touch!” I nod and call back, “I will!” but it means nothing. I don’t have her address or new phone number. Even later, with Facebook and Twitter, I’ll never be able to find her.
For a while, Jade and I try to hang out, trudging alongside each other to the grocery store du
ring lunch, trying to convince the other to shoplift and growing incensed when she won’t. One morning, I’m in the cafeteria before first period, scrambling to finish my algebra homework, when she marches up to me.
“So I saw that guy Craig at the bowling alley on Saturday,” she says.
I look up. She’s smiling, can barely keep her lips closed. She looks like she’s about to spill out all over the place.
“He said to tell you that you’re a cunt.” She waits, eyes wide, for my reaction. I feel my face burn and I imagine hurling my algebra book at her, knocking her over, yanking on her brassy bleached hair.
But I just roll my eyes and mumble something about him being a gun-loving pedophile, then turn back to my homework. After that, Jade starts hanging out with a popular group, the kids she was friends with in middle school. She dyes her hair brown and joins the tennis team. When we pass in the hallway, she stares straight ahead.
Rather than deal with finding a new place to sit in the cafeteria, I give up altogether and start spending lunch period at the diner in the strip mall. Every day I order coffee and pie while I read or finish homework, imagining that I look mysterious and adult sitting in a booth all by myself. Sometimes I feel men looking at me from their counter stools, and sometimes I meet their gaze, but it always ends there.
* * *
At home, deep in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, the internet is my only way out. Online, I search endlessly, googling different combinations of Strane’s name and Browick, in quotations and without, but find only his faculty profile and something about him volunteering at a community literacy program in 1995. Then, in mid-March, a new result appears: he won a national teaching award, attended a ceremony in New York. There’s a photo of him onstage accepting the plaque, a big grin on his face, white teeth shining through black beard. I don’t recognize his shoes and his hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.
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