My Dark Vanessa(30)

“I know what you mean,” I say.

He looks up from his book, light glinting off his glasses.

“I kind of feel like this whole thing is destiny.”

“This whole thing,” he repeats. “You mean what we do together?”

I nod. “Like maybe this is what I was born to do.”

As my words register, his lips start to tremble like he’s trying hard not to smile. “Go shut the door,” he says. “Turn out the lights.”



I use the pay phone in the Gould common room to call home the Sunday before Christmas break, and Mom says she has to pick me up on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, meaning an extra day of break, an extra day of no Strane. It’s hard enough getting through a weekend without him; I don’t know how I’ll manage to survive three weeks, so when she tells me this, it feels like the floor opens up beneath me.

“You didn’t even ask me! You can’t just decide that you’re going to pick me up a whole day early without asking me if it’s ok.” My panic gains momentum and I struggle not to cry. “I have responsibilities,” I say. “There are things I have to do.”

“What things?” Mom asks. “Good lord, why are you so upset? Where is this coming from?”

Pressing my forehead against the wall, I take a breath and manage to get out, “There’s a creative writing club meeting I can’t miss.”

“Oh.” Mom exhales like she expected something more serious. “Well, I won’t get there until six. That should give you enough time to go to your meeting.”

She takes a bite of something and it crunches between her teeth. I hate how she eats while she talks to me, or cleans, or has conversations with Dad at the same time. Sometimes she’ll take the phone with her into the bathroom and I don’t realize until I hear a flush in the background.

“I didn’t know you liked that club so much,” she says.

I wipe my nose with my sweatshirt’s dirty cuff. “It’s not about me liking it. It’s about taking my responsibilities seriously.”

“Hmm.” She takes another bite, and whatever it is rattles around in her teeth.



On Monday, when Strane and I sit in the dark classroom, I won’t let him kiss me. I turn away and twist my legs out of his reach.

“What wrong?” he asks.

I shake my head, don’t know how to explain. He seems completely unbothered by the upcoming break. He hasn’t even brought it up.

“It’s fine if you don’t want me to touch you,” he says. “Just tell me to stop.”

He leans in close, peering at me, trying to make out my expression in the dark. I can see the darting shine of his eyes because he’s not wearing his glasses—ever since I told him they hurt my face, he takes them off before we kiss.

“As much as I wish I could, I can’t read your mind,” he says.

His fingertips touch my knees and wait to see if I’ll jerk away. When I don’t, his hands creep farther up my thighs, over my hips, and around my waist, the casters of the chair squeaking as he pulls me close. I sigh, lean into him, his body like a mountain.

“It’s just we’re not going to be able to do this again for so long,” I say. “Three whole weeks.”

I feel him relax. “That’s what you’re sulking over?”

It’s how he laughs that makes me start to cry, like I’m being ridiculous, but he thinks it’s the idea of missing him that’s making me so upset.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, kissing my forehead. He calls me sensitive. “Like a . . .” He stops and softly laughs. “I was about to say like a little girl. I forget sometimes that’s exactly what you are.”

I turn my face deeper into him and whisper that I feel out of control. I want him to say he feels the same, but he just continues stroking my hair. Maybe he doesn’t need to say it. I think of his head in my lap the afternoon we first kissed, how he moaned, I’m going to ruin you. Of course he’s out of control; you have to be careening to do what we’re doing.

He pulls away, kisses the corners of my mouth. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

The ground outside is covered in snow, reflecting enough light into the classroom so I can see his smile, the wrinkles that appear around his eyes. Up close, his face is disjointed, enormous. On the bridge of his nose there are indentations from his glasses that never go away.

“But you have to promise not to agree to what I’m proposing unless you absolutely want to,” he says. “Ok?”

I sniff, wipe my eyes. “Ok.”

“What if after Christmas break . . . say, the first Friday we’re back . . .” He draws in a breath. “What if you came to my house?”

I blink in surprise. I assumed this would happen eventually, but this feels soon, though maybe not. We’ve been kissing for over two weeks.

When I say nothing, he continues. “I think it’d be nice to spend time together outside of this classroom. We could eat dinner, look at each other with the lights on. That’d be fun, right?”

Immediately, I’m afraid. I wish I weren’t and, chewing on the inside of my cheek, I do my best to rationalize it away. I’m not afraid of him but rather of his body—the sheer size of it, the expectation that I do things to it. As long as we stay in the classroom, kissing is all we can do, but going to his house means anything can happen. That the obvious will happen. Meaning sex.