The strip mall diner closed over the summer, so I eat in the cafeteria, sitting with Wendy and Maria, girls from my English class. Maria is on exchange from Chile and lives with Wendy’s family. They’re exactly the kind of girls my parents want me to be friends with—studious, sweet, no boyfriends. At lunch, we eat low-fat yogurt and apple slices with two measured tablespoons of peanut butter while we quiz each other with flash cards, compare homework, and obsess over college applications. Wendy is hoping for University of Vermont, and Maria wants to stay in the States for college, too. Her dream is anywhere in Boston.

Life goes on and on. I get my license but no car. Babe comes home with porcupine quills all over her muzzle, and Mom and I have to hold her down while Dad pulls out each one with needle-nose pliers. Dad is elected union rep at the hospital. Mom gets an A in her history class at the community college. The leaves change. I get decent SAT scores and finish another draft of my college application essay. In English, there’s a lesson on Robert Frost, but the teacher makes no mention of sex. Maria and Wendy share a bagel at lunch, tearing pieces off with their fingers. A boy in my physics class asks me to the water semiformal and I say yes out of curiosity, but he has oniony breath and the thought of him touching me makes me want to die. In the dark auditorium, when the boy leans in to kiss me during a slow dance, I blurt out that I have a boyfriend.

“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.

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.

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.

She tells me she’s sorry, but all I care about is Strane. As she apologizes, I try to type out questions, no longer caring that she can see my false starts, my scramble for words. She moves on to talking about college—how she’s headed to Brown, that she’s heard good things about Atlantica—but I don’t want to talk about college; I want to ask her about the length of his hair, if it’s overgrown and unkempt, if his clothes are frumpy—the only visible markers of his mental state I can think of, because I can’t expect her to tell me what I really want to know: Is he depressed? Does he miss me? I end up asking simply, Do you see him a lot? and her hate for him launches forth, palpable through the screen.

After that, my brain launches off into the air, into the woods, needing the distance to understand. January 2001. When he and I were driving through the flashing yellow streetlights to his house, when he was giving me the strawberry pajamas—he lied to the school about me then. I was delirious, not yet able to grasp what was happening; he was strategizing and looking ten steps ahead. At the end, when it fell apart and he convinced me to stand in front of that room of people and call myself a liar, what was it that he said? “Vanessa, they decided you have to leave and there’s no changing their minds. It’s done.” I thought “they” meant Mrs. Giles, the administration, the institution of Browick itself. I thought it was him and me against them.

Before she signs off, Jenny asks me what really happened. Hands shaky, I start to type out, he used me then threw me away, then think better and delete it, the specter of firing and police and Strane thrown in prison still too frightening.

* * *

The day after my birthday, I tell my parents I have to go to the library in town for a school project that doesn’t exist. It’s the first time I’ve ever asked to take the car on my own. They’re in the yard, cleaning the garden before planting annuals, their arms filthy with dirt up to their elbows. Mom hesitates, but Dad waves his hand. Go ahead.

“You’ve got to go out on your own sometime,” he says.

When I’m halfway to the car, keys in hand, Mom calls to me. My heart skips, half hoping she’ll tell me to stop.

“Will you buy some milk while you’re out?” she asks.

As I drive, the logic I constructed while in exile bows under this new weight and threatens to collapse. I’m not sure what, other than desperation, made me believe he wanted to get in touch and was waiting until I turned eighteen. He made no explicit promise, not even during the last conversation we had. He assured me that everything would be ok, and I took “ok” to mean one thing, but who knows what it meant to him. “Ok” could simply mean unscathed, unfired, and unjailed. My hands grow slick on the steering wheel. How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air, out of nothing.

Once in town, I turn onto the small highway heading west to Norumbega, trying to work through my memories to find anything real. The times I told people at school that I had a secret older boyfriend—my body cringes when I think of it. I knew it wasn’t entirely true, but it felt true enough to lie about. He was waiting for me, even if the boyfriend label didn’t really fit. The whole time, I’d been discarded, unwanted. Maybe he’s moved on completely, is in love and having sex with someone else, a woman, a student.

My brain shorts out at the thought—a flash of bright light and pain. The car swerves into the soft shoulder, then back onto the road.

Norumbega is unchanged: the tree-lined river, the bookstore, the head shop, the pizza place, the bakery, Browick’s hilltop campus glinting above downtown. I park in his driveway, behind the station wagon. The same one we drove from campus to his house, then later through the down east woods, his free hand resting between my legs. So much time has passed, but it feels just like two years ago; I’m wearing the same clothes, look the same, or maybe I’ve gotten older and not realized it. Is there a chance he might not recognize me? I remember the shade of disappointment on his face when I turned sixteen. Practically a woman now. Maybe I’ve been hardened and aged. I feel tough, or at least tougher than I was. But why? I haven’t actually been through anything. I saw a car crash through the trees, talked to some men online, came close to being kidnapped by a loser with a gun collection, ate a lot of pie in a diner by myself. Maybe that all adds up to a kind of wisdom. I wonder whether I’d even fall for it if he were my teacher now.

Like a cop, I bang on his front door rather than knock because I want to scare him, and I half expect him not to answer, to stand unmoving in the middle of his living room and hold his breath until I give up and leave. It’s possible he doesn’t want to see me ever again; maybe that was his goal when he had me sent away, to thrust me out of his life along with all the life-ruining repercussions I embody.

But no—he opens the door right away, like he was waiting on the other side. He throws it open wide, reveals himself, looking older and younger at the same time, more gray in his beard, longer hair. His arms are tan. He wears a T-shirt and shorts, boat shoes with no socks, pale legs covered in dark hair.

“My god,” he says. “Look at you.”

He brings me inside, his hand on my back. The scent of his house, something I hadn’t thought to miss, fills my head, and I hold up my hands to ward it off. He asks if I want anything to drink, gestures to the living room and tells me to sit down. He opens the refrigerator, pulls out two bottles of beer. It’s barely past noon.

“Happy birthday,” he says as he hands me a bottle.

I don’t take it. “I know what you did,” I say, trying to hold on to the anger, but the words come out as squeaks. I’m a mouse already on the verge of tears. He touches his hand to my face to soothe me. I jerk away, and as I do I think of the line from Lolita, when Humbert finds Lo after so many years: “I’ll die if you touch me.”

“You had them kick me out,” I say.

I expect his face to go pale and slack, the look of someone caught, but he barely flinches. He just blinks a few times, like he’s trying to find an entry point into my anger. Once he gets there, he smiles.

“You’re upset,” he says.

“I’m pissed.”

“Ok.”

“You’re the one who got me kicked out. You threw me away.”

“I didn’t throw you away,” he says gently.

“But you got me kicked out.”

“We did that together.” He smiles with a furrowed brow, like he’s confused, like I’m being ridiculous. “Don’t you remember?”