My Dark Vanessa(45)

I open my eyes. “Ok.”

“Ok? Ok. Ok.” There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”

For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone.

“Go on,” he says. “I love you, Daddy.”

I say nothing, eyes fixed on my bedroom door.

“Just once.” His voice haggard and rough.

I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain.

I’m far away. I’m airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail. Now I fly out of the house, into the night, through the pines and across the frozen lake where the water moves and moans beneath the ice. He asks me to again say the words. I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans.

His labored breathing stops and I land back in my bedroom. He’s finished; it’s over. I try to imagine how it works when he does that, if he comes into his hand, or a towel, or straight onto the sheets. How gross it is for men, having the giveaway of a mess at the end. The thought You’re fucking disgusting surges through me.

Strane clears his throat. “Well, I better let you go,” he says.

After he hangs up, I throw the phone and it breaks open, batteries rolling across the floor. I lie in bed for a long time, awake but unmoving, eyes fixed on the blue shadows, my mind full of nothing, glassy and still enough to skate on.



Mom doesn’t tell me that she heard me talking on the phone until we’re driving back to Browick. When she says this, my hand grips the door handle, as though I might open it and hurl myself into the ditch.

“It sounded like you were talking to a boy,” she says. “Were you?”

I stare straight ahead. It was mostly Strane doing the talking, but she could have picked up and listened in. My parents don’t have a phone in their bedroom and I’d been using the only cordless. Maybe I hadn’t heard her go downstairs?

“It’s fine if you were,” she adds. “And it’s fine if you have a boyfriend. You don’t need to keep it a secret.”

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing, really.”

I study her out of the corner of my eye. I can’t tell if she’s telling the truth. Why does she think I was talking to a boy if she didn’t hear anything? My mind races alongside the car, trying to keep up. She must have heard something, but not enough to suspect anything unusual. If she heard Strane’s deep, unmistakably grown-man voice, she would have freaked out right then, stormed into my room and ripped the phone from my hands. She wouldn’t wait until we were alone in the car to bring it up so delicately.

I let out a slow breath and loosen my grip on the door handle. “Don’t tell Dad.”

“I won’t,” she says, her voice bright. She seems pleased, happy that I confided in her and shared my secret, or maybe she’s relieved at the idea of me having a boyfriend, being social, fitting in.

“But I want you to tell me about him,” she says.

She asks me his name, and for a second, I blank; I never call him by his first name. I could use a fake one, and probably should, but the temptation to say it out loud is too strong. “Jacob.”

“Oh, I like that. Is he good-looking?”

I shrug, unsure what to say.

“That’s ok,” she says. “Looks aren’t everything. It’s more important that he’s nice to you.”

“He’s nice to me.”

“Good,” she says. “That’s the only thing I care about.”

I lean against the headrest, close my eyes. It feels like getting an itch scratched, the relief of hearing her say that Strane being nice is the most important thing, more important than looks, and if treating me well is more important than looks, then it’s more important than the age difference, or his being my teacher.

Mom starts asking more questions—what grade he’s in, where he’s from, what classes we have together—and my chest tightens; I shake my head and snap, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

We’re quiet for a mile and then she asks, “Are you having sex?”

“Mom!”

“If you are, you should be on the Pill. I’ll make you an appointment.” She stops, says quietly, more to herself than me, “No, you’re only fifteen. That’s too young.” She looks over, her brow furrowed. “You’re supervised there. It’s not like some kind of free-for-all.”

I sit unmoving, unblinking, unsure if she really wants me to reassure her. Yes, we’re supervised. The teachers watch us very closely. It’s suddenly sickening, this conversation, the deception, treating it all like a game.

Am I a monster? I wonder. I must be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to lie like this.