My Dark Vanessa(42)

“It’s a difficult book,” Strane explains. “Less accessible than Lolita. It’s the type of novel that asks the reader to relinquish control. You have to experience it rather than try to understand it. Postmodernism . . .” He trails off, seeing the disappointment on my face. I wanted another Lolita.

“Let me show you something.” He takes the paperback from my hands, flips to a page, and points to a stanza. “Look, it seems to reference you.”

Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,

My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest

My Admirable butterfly! Explain

How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,

Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade

Blubber your face, and ear, and shoulder blade?



My breath catches; my face goes hot.

“Uncanny, isn’t it?” He smiles down at the page. “My dark Vanessa, worshipped and caressed.” He smooths his hand down my hair, twirls a lock around his finger. Crimson-barred, maple-red hair. I think of what I said when he showed me the Jonathan Swift poem, about all this feeling destined. I hadn’t really meant it then. I said it only to show him how happy and willing I was. But seeing my name on the page this time feels like a free fall, a loss of control. Maybe this really was predetermined. Maybe I was made for this.

We’re still huddled over the book, Strane’s hand resting on my back, when old, balding Mr. Noyes walks into the classroom. We dart off in opposite directions, me back to the seminar table and Strane behind his desk, obviously caught. But Mr. Noyes seems unbothered. He laughs and says to Strane, “I see you’ve got a classroom pet,” as though it’s no big deal. It makes me wonder if we have to worry so much about getting caught. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the school finds out. They could give Strane a slap on the wrist, tell him to hold off until I graduate and turn eighteen.

When Mr. Noyes leaves, I ask Strane, “Have other students and teachers done this?”

“Done what?”

“This.”

He looks up from his desk. “It’s been known to happen.”

He turns back to reading as the next question rests heavy on my tongue. Before I let it out, I look down at my hands. I imagine the answer laid out plainly on his face and don’t want to see it. I don’t really want to know.

“What about you? Have you, with another student?”

“Do you think I have?” he asks.

I look up, caught off guard. I don’t know what I think. I know what I want to believe, what I have to believe, but I have no idea how those things align with what might’ve happened in all the years before me. He’s been a teacher for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

Strane watches as I grapple for words, a smile creeping across his face. Finally, he says, “The answer is no. Even if I had moments of desire, it never would’ve seemed worth the risk. Not until you came along.”

I try to hide how happy this makes me feel by rolling my eyes, but his words break my chest wide open and leave me helpless. There’s nothing stopping him from reaching in and grabbing whatever he wants. I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.



I’m reading Pale Fire when Ms. Thompson knocks on my door for curfew check. She peeks her head around the door, her makeup off, hair tied up in a scrunchie; she sees me and checks my name off her list.

“Vanessa, hey.” She steps into the room. “Remember to sign out before you leave on Friday, ok? You forgot before Christmas break.”

She takes a step closer and I dog-ear the page I’m reading, close the novel. I feel light-headed from finding more evidence of myself in the text: the town where the main character lives is “New Wye.”

“How’s the homework?” she asks.

I’ve never asked Strane about Ms. Thompson. Since the Halloween dance, I haven’t seen them together, and I remember how, after he and I had sex for the first time, he said it had been a while since he’d “been intimate.” If they never had sex, then they were only friends, so there’s no need for me to be jealous. I know all that. Still, when I’m around her a meanness takes over me, an urge to give her a glimpse of what I’ve done, what I’m capable of.

I set down Pale Fire so she can see the cover. “It’s not homework. Or, I guess it kind of is. It’s for Mr. Strane.”

She gives me a smile, irritatingly benign. “You have Mr. Strane for English?”

“Yup.” I look up through my eyelashes. “He’s never talked to you about me?”

The wrinkles in her forehead deepen. The look lasts only for a second. If I wasn’t on high alert, I wouldn’t even notice it. “Can’t say that he has,” she says.

“That’s surprising,” I say. “He and I are pretty close.”

I watch the suspicion bloom on her face, a sense of something amiss.



The next afternoon while Strane is at a faculty meeting, I sit behind his desk, something I would never dare to do otherwise. The door is closed, no witnesses to see me thumb through his piles of ungraded assignments and lesson plans and pull open the long, skinny desk drawer that has the weird stuff in it: an opened bag of gumdrops, a pendant of St. Christopher on a broken chain, a bottle of antidiarrhea medicine that I shove to the back in disgust.