My Dark Vanessa(14)
“Well?” He leans forward on his elbows, eager to hear what I have to say.
I hesitate, scrunch my nose. “She’s kind of self-absorbed.”
He laughs at that—a real laugh. “That’s fair. And I appreciate your honesty.”
“But I liked it,” I say. “Especially the one you marked.”
“I thought you would.” He steps over to the built-in bookcases, scans the shelves. “Here,” he says, handing me another book—Emily Dickinson. “Let’s see what you think of this.”
I don’t wait to give him back the Dickinson. The next day after class, I drop the book onto his desk and say, “Not a fan.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was kind of boring.”
“Boring!” He presses his palm over his chest. “Vanessa, you’re breaking my heart.”
“You said you appreciated my honesty,” I say with a laugh.
“I do,” he says. “I just appreciate it more when I’m in agreement with it.”
The next book he gives me is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is, according to Mr. Strane, the furthest thing from boring. “And she was a red-haired girl from Maine,” he says, “just like you.”
I carry his books with me, reading them whenever I can, every spare few minutes and through every meal. I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.
His attention makes me brave enough to show him drafts of my poems when he asks to read more of my work, and he returns them with critiques—not just praise but real suggestions for making the writing better. He circles words I’m already unsure about and writes, Best choice? Other words he crosses out altogether and writes, You could do better. On a poem I wrote in the middle of the night, after waking from a dream set in a place that seemed a mix of his classroom and my bedroom back home, he writes, Vanessa, this one scares me a little.
I start spending faculty service hour in his classroom, studying at the seminar table while he works at his desk and the windows drape October light over us both. Sometimes other students come in for help on assignments, but most of the time it’s only us. He asks me questions about myself, about growing up on Whalesback Lake, what I think of Browick, and what I want to do once I’m older. He says that for me the sky is the limit, that I possess a rare kind of intelligence, something that can’t be measured in grades or test scores.
“I worry sometimes about students like you,” he says. “Ones who come from tiny towns with run-down schools. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lost at a place like this. But you’re doing ok, aren’t you?”
I nod yes but wonder what he’s imagining when he says “run-down.” My old middle school wasn’t that bad.
“Just remember,” he says, “you’re special. You have something these dime-a-dozen overachievers can only dream of.” When he says “dime-a-dozen overachievers,” he gestures at the empty seats around the seminar table and I think of Jenny—her obsession with grades, how I once walked into our room to find her sobbing in bed with her boots still on, rock salt on her sheets, her precalculus midterm crumpled on the floor. She’d gotten an 88. Jenny, that’s still a B, I’d said, but it did nothing to console her. She just rolled toward the wall, hiding her face with her hands as she cried.
Another afternoon while he’s typing up lesson plans, Mr. Strane says out of nowhere, “I wonder what they think about you spending so much time with me.” I don’t know who he means by “they”—other students or teachers, or maybe he means everyone, reducing the entire world down to a collective other.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
“Because no one ever notices anything I do.”
“That isn’t true,” he says. “I notice you all the time.”
I look up from my notebook. He’s stopped typing, his fingers resting on top of the keys as he gazes at me, his face so tender it turns my body cold.
After that I imagine him watching me when I’m bleary-eyed at breakfast, when I’m walking downtown, when I’m alone in my room, pulling the elastic from my ponytail and crawling into bed with the latest book he chose for me. In my mind he watches me turn the pages, transfixed by every little thing I do.
Parents’ weekend arrives, three days of Browick putting its best foot forward. Friday is a parents-only cocktail hour followed by a school-wide formal dinner in the dining hall with food that never otherwise appears on the menu: roast beef, fingerling potatoes, warm blueberry pie. Parent-teacher conferences are Saturday before lunch, then home games are in the afternoon, and parents who stay until Sunday go downtown in the morning, either to church or out to brunch. Last year mine came to everything, even to Mass on Sunday, but this year Mom tells me, “Vanessa, if we sit through all that stuff again, Dad and I are going to lose our will to live,” so they come only Saturday for the conferences. It’s fine; Browick is my world, not theirs. They’d probably vote Republican before they’d put one of those i’m a browick parent bumper stickers on their car.