My Dark Vanessa(68)
All I can do is suffer through. Paddle the canoe into the middle of the lake and let it drift back to shore, read Lolita for the millionth time and scrutinize Strane’s faded annotations. Stare down page 140, when Humbert and Lo are in the car the morning after they have sex for the first time, where a line is underlined in what looks like fresher ink: “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Think of Strane driving me back to campus after the first night at his house, how closely he studied me when he asked if I was ok. Scrawl in my notebook, “Jailbait” means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch.
I dread August, because once the Browick move-in date passes, I can no longer pretend there’s a chance this will fix itself, that I might wake up that morning to the truck packed, my parents crying out, “Surprise! It’s all been worked out. Of course you’re going back!” On the morning of move-in day, I wake to an empty house, my parents both at work. A note on the kitchen counter tells me to vacuum, do the dishes, brush Babe, water the tomato and zucchini plants. Still in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, I throw on sneakers and take off into the woods. I run straight up the bluff, underbrush scraping my shins. When I reach the top, gasping for breath, I look out over the lake, the mountain, that long, low whale’s back rising from the earth. The endless woods interrupted only by a wisp of highway, big rigs gliding like toys on a track. I think of stepping into an empty dorm room, the sun draped across a bare mattress, finding someone else’s initials carved on the windowsill. I imagine a new class taking their seats around the seminar table while Strane looks on, thinking of me.
My new high school is a long one-story building that was hurriedly built in the sixties to accommodate all the baby boomers and hasn’t been updated since. It shares a parking lot with a strip mall that has a discount grocery store, a laundromat, a telemarketing center where people sell credit cards, and a diner that still allows people to smoke.
It’s the opposite of Browick in every possible way. Carpeted classrooms, pep rallies, kids in T-shirts and jeans, voc classes, cafeteria trays of chicken nuggets and slab pizza, classrooms so crowded they can’t fit another desk. On the drive in that morning, Mom says it’s good I’m starting on the first day of a new school year, that I’ll blend right in, but as I walk the hallways it’s clear I’ve been marked. Kids I recognize from middle school avert their eyes, while others openly stare. In Honors French 4, the textbook full of lessons I’ve already learned, two boys in the row beside me whisper about a new girl they’ve heard about, a junior, a transfer, a slut who boned a teacher.
At first, I can only blink blindly down at my textbook. Boned?
Then rage rushes through me. Because these boys have no idea the girl they’re talking about is sitting next to them, because I have only two choices and neither is fair—sit and say nothing, or cause a scene and out myself. Maybe the boys assume I’m a senior like them, but more likely is that it doesn’t even cross their minds that I’m the girl in question. From the outside, I must seem ordinary, barefaced and dressed in size ten corduroys. You? they’d ask in disbelief, unable to reconcile me with the slut they had imagined.
On my fourth day, two girls fall into step beside me on the way to the cafeteria. One I know from middle school, Jade Reynolds. Her brown hair is bleached a brassy orange, and she’s ditched the wide-leg jeans and barbell necklaces she used to wear but kept the kohl-rimmed eyes. The other girl, Charley, I recognize from my chemistry class. She’s tall, smells of cigarettes, has hair so bleached it’s almost white. Her hooked nose makes her eyes look slightly crossed, like a Siamese cat.
Jade smiles at me as we walk, a smile that’s less about being nice and more about peering straight into me. “Vanessa, hi,” she says brightly, drawing out her words. “Do you want to eat with us?”
My shoulders hunch reflexively. I shake my head, sensing a trap. “That’s ok.”
Jade ducks her head. “Are you sure?” She keeps smiling that strange searching smile.
“Come on,” Charley says, her voice rough. “Nobody wants to eat alone.”
In the cafeteria, the girls head straight to a table in the corner. I barely sit down before Jade leans across the table, her brown eyes wide.
“So,” she says. “Why did you transfer here?”
“I didn’t like it,” I say. “Boarding school was too expensive.”
Jade and Charley exchange a look.
“We heard you had sex with a teacher,” Jade says.
In a way, it’s a relief to hear the question leveled at me directly—a relief, too, to imagine the story snaking its way across the state, refusing to be left behind. My parents can pretend it never happened but it did, it did.
“Was he hot?” Charley asks. “I’d fuck a hot teacher.”
They watch me curiously as I struggle to answer. Like with the boys in French class, I know what they imagine is way off—a handsome young teacher, like something out of a movie. I wonder what they’d think of me if they saw Strane with his belly and wire-framed glasses.
“So you really did?” Jade asks, a note of incredulity in her voice. She isn’t convinced. I lift my shoulders, not quite affirmation but not a denial, and Charley nods like she understands.