We drive through town: blocks of Victorian mansions fallen into disrepair and broken up into apartments, the empty downtown, the sprawling hospital, the grinning Paul Bunyan statue who, with his black hair and beard, looks a little like Mr. Strane.

“It was a man,” I say. “You really think it’s weird?”

“Yes,” Mom says. “I really do. Do you want me to talk to someone? I’ll go in there and cause a scene.”

I picture her storming into the administration building, demanding to talk to the headmaster. I shake my head. No, I don’t want that. “It was just a random thing he said,” I say. “It really wasn’t a big deal.”

With that, Mom relaxes a little. “Who was it?” she asks again. “I won’t do anything. I just want to know.”

“My politics teacher.” I don’t even hesitate in the lie. “Mr. Sheldon.”

“Mr. Sheldon.” She spits it out like it’s the stupidest name she’s ever heard. “You shouldn’t be hanging out with teachers anyway. Focus on making friends.”

I watch the road pass by. We could take the interstate to Browick, but Mom refuses, says it’s a racetrack full of angry people. She drives a two-lane highway instead that takes twice as long.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, you know.”

She glances over, her brow furrowed.

“I prefer to be by myself. It’s normal. You shouldn’t give me such a hard time about it.”

“I’m not giving you a hard time,” she says, but we both know that’s not true. After a moment, she adds, “I’m sorry. I just worry about you.”

We hardly talk for the rest of the drive, and as I stare out the window, I can’t help but feel like I’ve won.

I’m sitting at a study carrel in the library, geometry homework spread out before me. I’m trying to concentrate, but my brain feels like a rock skipping over water. Or, no—like a rock rattling around in a tin can. I take out my notebook to jot down the line and get distracted by the island girl poem I’m still working on. When I next look up, an hour has passed, and my geometry homework is still untouched.

I rub my face, pick up my pencil, and try to work, but within minutes I’m gazing out the window. It’s the golden hour, light setting the fiery trees ablaze. Boys in soccer jerseys with cleats slung over their shoulders head back from the fields. Two girls carry violin cases like backpacks, their twin ponytails swinging with each step.

Then I see Ms. Thompson and Mr. Strane walking together toward the humanities building. They move slowly, taking their time, Mr. Strane with his hands clasped behind his back and Ms. Thompson smiling, touching her face. I try to remember if I’ve seen them together before, try to decide if Ms. Thompson is pretty. She has blue eyes and black hair, a combination my mother always calls striking, but she’s chubby and her butt sticks out like a shelf. It’s the sort of body I’m afraid I’ll grow up to have if I’m not careful.

I squint across the distance to gather more details. They’re close but not touching. At one point, Ms. Thompson tips her head back and laughs. Is Mr. Strane funny? He hasn’t ever made me laugh. Pressing my face against the window, I try to keep them in my sight, but they round a corner and disappear behind the orange leaves of an oak tree.

We take PSATs and I do ok but not as well as most other sophomores, who start receiving Ivy League brochures in their mailboxes. I buy another day planner to help with my organization, which gets noticed by my teachers and passed on to Mrs. Antonova, who gives me a tin of hazelnut candies for a job well done.

In English we read Walt Whitman and Mr. Strane talks about the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions. I begin to pay attention to the ways he seems to contradict himself, how he went to Harvard but tells stories about growing up poor, the way he sprinkles eloquent speech with obscenities and pairs tailored blazers and ironed shirts with scuffed hiking boots. His teaching style is contradictory, too. Speaking up in class always feels risky, because if he likes what you say, he’ll clap and bound over to the chalkboard to elaborate on the brilliant comment you made, but if he doesn’t like it, he won’t even let you finish—he cuts you off with an “Ok, that’s enough” that slices to the bone. It makes me scared to talk even though sometimes after he asks the class an open-ended question, he’ll stare straight at me, like he wants to know specifically what I have to say.

In the margins of my class notes, I keep track of the details he lets slip about himself: he grew up in Butte, Montana, pronounced like cute; before going to Harvard at eighteen, he’d never seen the ocean; he lives in downtown Norumbega, across from the public library; he doesn’t like dogs, was mauled by one as a boy. One Tuesday after creative writing club, when Jesse is already out the door and halfway down the hall, Mr. Strane says he has something for me. He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and takes out a book.

“Is this for class?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “It’s for you.” He walks around the desk, puts the book in my hands: Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. “Have you read her?”

I shake my head, turn the book over. It’s worn, with a blue cloth cover. A scrap of paper sticks out between the pages as a makeshift bookmark.

“She’s a bit overdone,” Mr. Strane says. “But young women love her.”

I don’t know what he means by “overdone” but don’t want to ask. I flip through the book—flashes of poems—and stop at the bookmarked page; the title “Lady Lazarus” is capitalized in bold. “Why is this one marked?” I ask.

“Let me show you.”

Mr. Strane comes up beside me, turns the page. Standing so close to him feels like being swallowed; my head doesn’t reach his shoulder.

“Here.” He points to the lines:

He says, “That reminded me of you.” Then he reaches behind me and tugs on my ponytail.

I stare at the book as though I’m studying the poem, but the stanzas blur to black smears on a yellow page. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in response. It feels like I should laugh. I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.

In a quiet voice, Mr. Strane asks, “Is it ok that it reminded me of you?”

I lick my lips, lift my shoulders. “Sure.”

“Because the last thing I want is to overstep.”

Overstep. I’m not sure what he means by that, either, but the way he gazes down at me stops me from asking any questions. He suddenly seems both embarrassed and hopeful, like if I told him this wasn’t ok, he might start to cry.

So I smile, shake my head. “You’re not.”

He exhales. “Good,” he says, moving away from me, back to his desk. “Give it a read and let me know what you think. Maybe you’ll be inspired to write a poem or two.”

I leave the classroom and go straight to Gould, where I get into bed and read Ariel all the way through. I like the poems, but I’m more interested in figuring out why they reminded him of me and when this reminding might’ve happened—the afternoon with the leaf, maybe? Maple-red hair. I wonder how long he had this book in his desk drawer, if he waited awhile to decide whether to give it to me. Maybe he had to work up the courage.

I take the scrap of paper he used to mark “Lady Lazarus” and write in neat cursive, I rise with my red hair, then pin it to the corkboard above my desk. Adults are the only ones who ever say anything nice about my hair, but this is more than him being nice. He thinks about me. He thinks about me so much, certain things remind him of me. That means something.

I wait a few days before I return Ariel, dawdling at the end of class until everyone else leaves and then sliding the book onto his desk.

“Well?” He leans forward on his elbows, eager to hear what I have to say.

I hesitate, scrunch my nose. “She’s kind of self-absorbed.”

He laughs at that—a real laugh. “That’s fair. And I appreciate your honesty.”

“But I liked it,” I say. “Especially the one you marked.”

“I thought you would.” He steps over to the built-in bookcases, scans the shelves. “Here,” he says, handing me another book—Emily Dickinson. “Let’s see what you think of this.”

I don’t wait to give him back the Dickinson. The next day after class, I drop the book onto his desk and say, “Not a fan.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It was kind of boring.”

“Boring!” He presses his palm over his chest. “Vanessa, you’re breaking my heart.”

“You said you appreciated my honesty,” I say with a laugh.

“I do,” he says. “I just appreciate it more when I’m in agreement with it.”

The next book he gives me is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is, according to Mr. Strane, the furthest thing from boring. “And she was a red-haired girl from Maine,” he says, “just like you.”

I carry his books with me, reading them whenever I can, every spare few minutes and through every meal. I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.

His attention makes me brave enough to show him drafts of my poems when he asks to read more of my work, and he returns them with critiques—not just praise but real suggestions for making the writing better. He circles words I’m already unsure about and writes, Best choice? Other words he crosses out altogether and writes, You could do better. On a poem I wrote in the middle of the night, after waking from a dream set in a place that seemed a mix of his classroom and my bedroom back home, he writes, Vanessa, this one scares me a little.

I start spending faculty service hour in his classroom, studying at the seminar table while he works at his desk and the windows drape October light over us both. Sometimes other students come in for help on assignments, but most of the time it’s only us. He asks me questions about myself, about growing up on Whalesback Lake, what I think of Browick, and what I want to do once I’m older. He says that for me the sky is the limit, that I possess a rare kind of intelligence, something that can’t be measured in grades or test scores.

“I worry sometimes about students like you,” he says. “Ones who come from tiny towns with run-down schools. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lost at a place like this. But you’re doing ok, aren’t you?”

I nod yes but wonder what he’s imagining when he says “run-down.” My old middle school wasn’t that bad.

“Just remember,” he says, “you’re special. You have something these dime-a-dozen overachievers can only dream of.” When he says “dime-a-dozen overachievers,” he gestures at the empty seats around the seminar table and I think of Jenny—her obsession with grades, how I once walked into our room to find her sobbing in bed with her boots still on, rock salt on her sheets, her precalculus midterm crumpled on the floor. She’d gotten an 88. Jenny, that’s still a B, I’d said, but it did nothing to console her. She just rolled toward the wall, hiding her face with her hands as she cried.

Another afternoon while he’s typing up lesson plans, Mr. Strane says out of nowhere, “I wonder what they think about you spending so much time with me.” I don’t know who he means by “they”—other students or teachers, or maybe he means everyone, reducing the entire world down to a collective other.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say.

“Why’s that?”

“Because no one ever notices anything I do.”

“That isn’t true,” he says. “I notice you all the time.”

I look up from my notebook. He’s stopped typing, his fingers resting on top of the keys as he gazes at me, his face so tender it turns my body cold.

After that I imagine him watching me when I’m bleary-eyed at breakfast, when I’m walking downtown, when I’m alone in my room, pulling the elastic from my ponytail and crawling into bed with the latest book he chose for me. In my mind he watches me turn the pages, transfixed by every little thing I do.

Parents’ weekend arrives, three days of Browick putting its best foot forward. Friday is a parents-only cocktail hour followed by a school-wide formal dinner in the dining hall with food that never otherwise appears on the menu: roast beef, fingerling potatoes, warm blueberry pie. Parent-teacher conferences are Saturday before lunch, then home games are in the afternoon, and parents who stay until Sunday go downtown in the morning, either to church or out to brunch. Last year mine came to everything, even to Mass on Sunday, but this year Mom tells me, “Vanessa, if we sit through all that stuff again, Dad and I are going to lose our will to live,” so they come only Saturday for the conferences. It’s fine; Browick is my world, not theirs. They’d probably vote Republican before they’d put one of those i’m a browick parent bumper stickers on their car.

After the conferences, they come see my room, Dad in his Red Sox hat and buffalo check flannel and Mom trying to counterbalance him with her sweater set. He wanders around the room, inspecting the bookshelves, while she reclines next to me on the bed and tries to hold my hand.

“Don’t,” I say as I wrench my hand away.

“Then let me smell your neck,” she says. “I’ve missed your scent.”

I lift my shoulder to my ear to ward her off. “That’s so weird, Mom,” I say. “That’s not normal.” Last winter break, she asked if she could have my favorite scarf so she could store it in a box and take it out to smell when she missed me. It’s the sort of thought I have to push out of my head immediately because otherwise I feel so guilty I can’t breathe.

Mom starts describing the conferences, and all I want to know is what Mr. Strane said, but I wait until she works her way through the list of teachers because I don’t want to raise suspicion by showing too much interest.

Finally, she says, “Now, your English teacher seems like an interesting man.”

“Was that the big bearded guy?” Dad asks.

“Yes, the one who went to Harvard,” she says, drawing out the word. Hah-vahd. I wonder how it came up, if Mr. Strane somehow dropped into the conversation the fact that he’d gone there or if my parents noticed the diploma hanging on the wall behind his desk.

Mom says again, “A very interesting man.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “What did he say?”

“He said you wrote a good essay last week.”

“That’s all?”

“Should he have said more?”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek, mortified at the thought of him talking about me as though I were just another student. She wrote a good essay last week. Maybe that’s all I am to him.

Mom says, “You know who I was not impressed by? That politics teacher, Mr. Sheldon.” Shooting me a pointed look, she adds, “He seemed like a real asshole.”

“Jan, come on,” Dad says. He hates it when she swears in front of me.

I push myself off the bed and throw open my closet door, fuss around with my clothes so I won’t have to look at them while they debate whether they should stay on campus for dinner or head back home before dark.

“Would you mind awful if we don’t stay for dinner?” they ask. I stare at my hanging clothes and mumble that it doesn’t matter. When I give them my usual brusque goodbye, I try not to get annoyed when Mom’s eyes tear up.

On the Friday before our big Whitman paper is due, Mr. Strane goes around the seminar table and calls on us at random to share our thesis statements. He gives us immediate feedback, deeming our theses either “good but needs work” or “scrap it and start over,” and in the process anxiety dissolves us all. Tom Hudson gets “scrap it and start over,” and for a second I think he might cry, but when Jenny gets “good but needs work,” she really does blink back tears and part of me wants to run around the table, throw my arms around her, and tell Mr. Strane to leave her alone. When we get to my thesis, he says it’s perfect.

There’s still fifteen minutes left of class after everyone is evaluated, so Mr. Strane tells us to use the rest of the period to fix our theses. I sit, unsure what to do since he called mine perfect as is, and from behind his desk he calls my name. He holds up the poem I gave him at the beginning of class and gestures for me to come to his desk. “Let’s have a conference on this,” he says. I stand and my chair scrapes against the floor just as Jenny drops her pencil to shake a cramp out of her hand. For a moment our eyes lock, and I feel her watch me walk to his desk.

I sit in the chair next to Mr. Strane and see my poem doesn’t have any marks in the margins. “Come a little closer so we can talk quietly,” he says, and before I can move, he hooks his fingers around the backrest of my chair and wheels me right beside him so we’re less than a foot apart.

If anyone wonders what he and I are doing, they don’t show it. Around the seminar table, everyone’s head is ducked in concentration. It’s as though they’re in one world, and Mr. Strane and I are in another. With the heel of his hand, he presses the crease out of my poem from where I folded it and begins to read. He’s so close I can smell him—coffee and chalk dust—and as he reads I watch his hands, his flat bitten-down nails, dark hair on his wrists. I wonder why he offered to have a conference if he hadn’t yet read the poem. I wonder what he thought of my parents, if he thought they were hicks, Dad in his flannel and Mom clutching her purse to her chest. Oh, you went to Harvard, they must have said, their accents opening up in awe.

Pointing his pen at the page, Mr. Strane whispers, “Nessa, I have to ask, did you mean to sound sexy here?”

My eyes dart to the lines he’s pointing at:

The question makes me split off from myself, like my body stays beside his while my brain retreats to the seminar table. No one has ever called me sexy before, and only my parents call me Nessa. I wonder if they called me that during the conference. Maybe Mr. Strane noted the nickname and tucked it away for himself.

Did I mean to sound sexy? “I don’t know.”

He backs away from me, a tiny movement but one I feel, and he says, “I don’t mean to embarrass you.”

This, I realize, is a test. He wants to see my reaction to being called sexy, and embarrassment means I failed. So I shake my head. “I’m not embarrassed.”

He reads on, writes an exclamation point next to another line and whispers, more to himself than to me, “Oh, that is lovely.”

Somewhere down the hallway, a door slams. At the seminar table, Gregg Akers cracks his knuckles one at a time and Jenny drags her eraser back and forth over the thesis statement she just can’t get right. My eyes drift to the windows and spot something red. Squinting, I see a balloon, its string caught on a bare branch of the maple tree. It floats in the breeze, knocking against leaves and bark. Where would a balloon even come from? I stare at it for what feels like a long time, so focused I don’t even blink.

Then Mr. Strane’s knee touches my bare thigh, right below the hemline of my skirt. With his eyes still on the poem and the tip of his pen following the lines, his knee nestles against me. I freeze, possum-dead. At the seminar table, nine heads bow in concentration. Out the window, a red balloon hangs limp from a tree limb.

At first I assume he doesn’t realize, that he thinks my leg is the desk or the side of the chair. I wait for him to recognize what he’s done, to see where his knee drifted and whisper a quick “sorry” and shift away, but his knee stays pressed into me. When I try to be polite and inch away, he moves with me.

“I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”

Shielded by the desk, he reaches down and pats my knee gently, gingerly, the way you might pet a dog before you’re sure it won’t turn mean and bite you. I don’t bite him. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. He keeps writing notes on the poem while his other hand strokes my knee and my mind slips out of me. It brushes up against the ceiling so I can see myself from above—hunched shoulders, thousand-yard stare, bright red hair.

Then class is over. He moves away from me, the spot on my knee cold where his hand has left it, and the room is all motion and sound, zippers zipping and textbooks slamming shut and laughter and words and no one knowing what took place right in front of them.

“Looking forward to the next one,” Mr. Strane says. He hands me the marked-up poem as though everything’s normal, like what he did never happened.

The nine other students pack up their things and leave the classroom to carry on with their lives, to practices and rehearsals and club meetings. I leave the room, too, but I’m not part of them. They’re the same, but I’m changed. I’m unhuman now. Untethered. While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail. I’m no longer myself; I am no one. I’m a red balloon caught in the boughs of a tree. I’m nothing at all.