My Dark Vanessa(79)

“Since when?” he asks, eyebrows cocked.

Since always, I think. You don’t know anything about me.

“He’s older,” I say. “You wouldn’t know him. Sorry, I should’ve told you sooner.”

For the rest of the dance, the boy doesn’t speak to me, and at the end of the night, he says he can’t drive me home, that I live too far and he’s too tired. I have to call Dad to pick me up, and on the ride home he asks what went wrong, what happened, did the boy try something, did he hurt me? I say, “Nothing happened. It was nothing,” all the while hoping he doesn’t realize how familiar our words are, his questions and my denial.



After a series of thin envelopes from colleges, half-hearted waitlists and outright rejections, in March a fat envelope from Atlantica College, a school the guidance counselor convinced me to add. I tear into it, my parents watching with proud smiles. Congratulations, we are delighted. Brochures and forms pour out asking if I want to live on campus, do I have a dorm preference, and which meal plan do I want? There’s an invitation to an accepted student day and a handwritten note from my future advisor, a poetry professor with half a dozen published collections. Your poems are extraordinary, she writes. I’m so looking forward to working with you. My hands shake as I flip through everything. Even though Atlantica is technically a state school and not prestigious, getting accepted still feels so much like Browick, I’m thrown back in time.

That night, after my parents go to bed, I grab the cordless phone and step outside onto the snowy yard, the moon illuminating the frozen lake.

It’s no surprise that Strane doesn’t answer. When the answering machine kicks in, I want to hang up and try again. Maybe if I keep calling, he’ll pick up out of pure exasperation. Even if he screams at me to leave him alone, at least I’ll get to hear his voice. I imagine him watching the caller ID, the flashing wye, phil & jan. There’s no way for him to know it’s not my parents calling to tell him they know everything and are going to make him pay, send him to prison. I hope he’s terrified, even if only for a moment. I love him, but when I think of that photo of him accepting the award in New York, the Association of New England Boarding Schools recognizing Jacob Strane as a distinguished teacher of the year, I want to hurt him.

His recorded voice speaks—“You’ve reached Jacob Strane . . .”—and I see him standing in his living room: his bare feet and T-shirt, his belly sloping over his underwear, his eyes on the machine. The beep pierces my ear and I stare across the lake, the long mountain purple against the blue-black sky.

“It’s me,” I say. “I know you can’t talk to me, but I wanted to tell you I got into Atlantica College. Starting on August twenty-first, that’s where I’ll be. And I’ll be eighteen then, so . . .”

I pause and hear the answering machine tape roll. I imagine it playing as evidence in a courtroom, Strane seated behind a table next to a lawyer, his head hanging in shame.

“I hope you’re waiting for me,” I say, “because I’m waiting for you.”



The weather warms and everything feels easier with the Atlantica acceptance in my pocket. It’s a sweetener for the bitterness of exile, a light at the end of this tunnel of shit. Despite the warnings teachers give that college acceptances can hypothetically be revoked, my grades fall to bare-effort Bs and Cs. Once or twice a week, I blow off afternoon classes to walk through the woods between the high school and the interstate, mud seeping into my sneakers as I watch the cars through the bare trees and smoke the cigarettes I pay a boy in my math class to buy for me. One afternoon, I see a deer dart out into the road and five cars, one after another, pile into a wreck. It takes just seconds for it to happen.

April, two days before my birthday, an alert pops up when I’m checking my email: jenny9876 has sent you a chat request—do you accept? I click “yes” so hard the mouse slips out from under my hand.

jenny9876: Hey Vanessa. It’s Jenny.

jenny9876: Hello?

jenny9876: Please answer if you’re there.





I watch the messages pop up, the line of text at the bottom of the chat window flashing jenny9876 is typing . . . jenny9876 is typing. Then it stops. I try to picture her—the line of her neck, gleaming brown hair. It’s April break at Browick; she must be at home in Boston. My fingers hover over the keyboard, but I don’t want to start typing until I’m ready, don’t want to let her see me start and stop and start again, a giveaway that I’m struggling.

dark_vanessa: what

jenny9876: Hey!

jenny9876: I’m so glad you’re there

jenny9876: How are you?

dark_vanessa: why are you messaging me?





She says she knows I must hate her because of what happened at Browick. That it’s been a long time and maybe I don’t even care anymore, but she still feels guilty. With graduation approaching, she’s been thinking about me a lot. How I’m not there and he still is—the unfairness of that.

jenny9876: I want you to know when I went to Mrs. Giles, I didn’t know what was going to happen.

jenny9876: This might sound naive, but I really thought he was going to get fired.

jenny9876: I only did what I did because I was so worried about you.