My Dark Vanessa(69)
The girls share a package of peanut butter crackers Jade produces from her backpack, both pulling the crackers apart and scraping the peanut butter off with their teeth. Their eyes follow the teacher circling the cafeteria. When the teacher ducks down to talk to a table across the room, Jade and Charley shoot up.
“Come on,” Charley says. “Bring your backpack.”
They hurry out of the cafeteria and down the hallway, turn a corner into a smaller wing of the school and then out a door that opens onto a walkway leading to a temporary classroom. They duck under the walkway railing and jump onto the grass below.
When I hesitate, Charley reaches up and smacks my ankle hard. “Jump before someone sees you.”
We run across the grass to the parking lot and the strip mall, where people push carts teeming with bags out of the grocery store. A man leaning against an empty taxi watches us as he takes a drag off a cigarette.
Charley grabs my sleeve and leads me into the grocery store. I drift along, following them through the aisles. The employees eye us. It’s obvious we’re from the high school; our backpacks are dead giveaways. Charley and Jade meander up and down a few aisles before heading for the makeup section.
“I like this,” Jade says, inspecting the bottom of a lipstick. She holds the tube out to Charley, who flips it over and reads the color name, “Wine with Everything.”
Jade hands the lipstick to me. “It’s nice,” I say, handing it back.
“No,” she whispers. “Put it in your pocket.”
I clasp my hand around the lipstick, realizing what this is all about. In one fluid motion, Charley shoves three bottles of nail polish into her backpack. Jade slips two lipsticks and an eyeliner into her pocket.
“That’s enough for now,” Charley says.
I follow them across the store, back toward the doors. When we cut through an empty register lane, I drop the lipstick among the candy bars.
In a parallel universe, I’m still at Browick. I have another single in Gould, bigger this time, with more natural light. Instead of chemistry, U.S. history, and algebra, I take courses in stellar astronomy, the sociology of rock and roll, the art of math. I have a directed reading with Strane and we meet in the afternoons, in his office, to talk about the books he tells me to read. Thoughts flow from him straight into me, our brains and bodies connected.
I dig through my bedroom closet and find the glossy brochures I brought home as an eighth grader who saw galaxies in her future. I cut up the pages and glue them on the cover of my journal—dining hall tables set with tablecloths for parents’ visiting weekend, students bent over books in the library, the autumn campus awash in golden light and fiery leaves, maple red. An L.L.Bean catalog comes in the mail and I cut that up, too. The men are all stand-ins for Strane, dressed in tweed blazers, flannel shirts, and hiking boots, holding mugs of steaming black coffee. I miss him so much, I exhaust myself from it. I drag myself from class to class, breaking the days down into manageable units. If not hours, then minutes. If I think about how many days lie before me, I end up obsessing over things I know I shouldn’t. Like, maybe being dead isn’t the worst thing. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
On the third week, the Twin Towers fall, and all day at school, we watch the news. Miniature American flags start appearing on cars, pinned to people’s jackets, in convenience stores next to the cash registers. Fox News plays on the TV in the cafeteria, and every evening my parents watch hours of CNN, the same shots of smoke billowing from the towers, George W. with a megaphone at Ground Zero, pundits speculating about where the anthrax letters are coming from. My new English teacher hangs an illustration of a crying bald eagle on the front of her desk, and in the corner of the whiteboard, she writes the words NEVER FORGET. Yet all I can think about is Strane, my own loss. In my notebook, I write, Our country was attacked. It is a tragic day. Close the front cover, open it again and add, And yet all I care about is myself. I am selfish and bad. I hope the words will shame me. They do nothing.
During lunch, Charley, Jade, and I smoke cigarettes around the back of the strip mall, hidden between two dumpsters piled high with cardboard. Jade wants Charley to skip chemistry so they can go somewhere—the mall, maybe? I don’t know. I’m not really listening. The real reason Jade wants Charley to skip is because she’s jealous, hates that Charley and I have a class together without her. Fifty whole minutes she doesn’t have access to.
“I can’t skip,” Charley says, flicking her cigarette. There’s a tattoo of a tiny heart on her middle finger—a stick and poke, she said. Her mother’s boyfriend did it. “We have a quiz today. Right, Vanessa?”
I move my head in a part shake, part nod. I have no idea.
Jade glares out at the grocery store loading docks, the backed-in eighteen-wheelers delivering food. “Figures,” she mutters.
“Oh my god, relax.” Charley laughs. “We’ll go after school. God, you’re so fuckin’ uptight.”
Jade exhales a cloud of smoke, nostrils flared.
In chemistry, Charley whispers that she’s horny for Will Coviello, wants him so bad she’s willing to give him a blow job and she never gives blow jobs. I hardly hear her because I’m so engrossed in the inside cover of my notebook, where I’ve written out Strane’s schedule from memory. Right now, he’s teaching sophomore English, sitting at the seminar table, someone else in my chair.