Dorm parents are always on the lookout for signs of depression because a sophomore boy hanged himself in his room four winters ago. Ms. Thompson organizes a lot of themed activities to help us stave off the bad feelings: game nights and craft nights, baking parties and movie showings, each announced on a brightly colored flyer slipped under our doors. She encourages us to come by her apartment and use her light therapy box if we ever feel like we’re “getting the SADs.”

Through it all, I’m only half there. My brain feels split, one part in the moment, the other existing within all the things that have happened to me. Now that Strane and I are having sex, I no longer fit in the places I used to. Everything I write feels hollow; I stop offering to walk Ms. Thompson’s dog. In class I feel disconnected, like I’m observing from a distance. During American lit I watch Jenny switch seats at the seminar table so she’s beside Hannah Levesque, who gazes at Jenny with wide-eyed adoration, the same expression I probably had all the time last year, and I feel a muted confusion, like I’m watching a movie with a disorienting plot. Truly, everything feels like a simulation, unreal. I have no choice but to pretend I’m the same as ever, but a canyon surrounds me now, sets me apart. I’m not sure if sex created the canyon or if it’s been there all along and Strane finally made me see it. Strane says it’s the latter. He says he sensed my difference as soon as he laid eyes on me.

“Haven’t you always felt like an outsider, a misfit?” he asks. “I’ll bet for as long as you can remember, you were called mature for your age. Weren’t you?”

I think back to third grade, how it felt to bring home a report card with a teacher’s note scribbled across the bottom: Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight years old going on thirty. I’m not sure I was ever really a kid at all.

Twenty minutes before curfew, I walk into the Gould bathroom with my shower caddy and towel to find Jenny standing at the sink, her face smeared with soap. Living in the same dorm, she and I inevitably run into each other, but I’ve done my best to reduce the frequency, opting for the back stairwell so I don’t walk past her room, taking my showers late in the evenings. We’re forced together in American lit, but there I’m so focused on Strane that it’s easy to ignore her. The rest of the class barely registers to me anymore.

So the sight of her in the bathroom wearing flip-flops and the same grungy bathrobe she had last year startles me so much, I reflexively start to duck back into the hallway. She stops me.

“You don’t have to run off,” she says, her voice languid as though bored. “Unless you really hate me that much?”

Her fingers rub her cheeks, massaging in the face wash. Her hair has grown out from the bob she had at the start of the year, enough now for a messy bun at the base of her slender neck—she used to act self-conscious about it, complained that it made her head look like a ball balancing on a straw, a flower on a stem. She acted the same way about her skinny fingers, her size six feet, constantly drawing attention to the features I envied the most. Do I still envy her? I sometimes notice Strane watching her in class, his eyes tracing the line of her spine up to her bright brown hair. The little Cleopatra. “Your neck is perfect, Jenny,” I would say. “You know it is.” And she did know; she must have known. She just wanted to hear me say it.

“I don’t hate you,” I say.

Jenny glances at me in the mirror, a doubtful look. “Sure you don’t.”

I wonder if she would be hurt if I said I don’t really feel anything at all toward her anymore. That I can’t remember why losing her friendship had felt like losing the world, or why that friendship seemed so profound, never to be repeated. Now, it only strikes me as embarrassing, like any other outgrown phase. I think of how wrecked I was when she started going out with Tom and he began appearing everywhere, sitting with us at every meal, waiting outside our algebra class to spend the two minutes it took to walk from one building to the next with her. I denied being jealous, but of course I was, both of her and of him. I wanted it all—a boyfriend and a best friend, someone to love me enough that nobody could weasel their way between us. It was a pulsating, monstrous wanting beyond my control. I knew it was too much to feel, let alone show, yet I couldn’t stop it from letting loose one Saturday afternoon, screaming at Jenny in the bakery downtown, crying like a toddler throwing a tantrum. She’d promised we would spend the day together, just us, a throwback to the pre-boyfriend days, but within an hour Tom appeared, pulling up a chair to our table and nuzzling his face into her neck. I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped.

That happened in late April, but the anger had been brewing within me for months, which explained Jenny’s lack of shock, her immediate response like she’d been waiting for my dam to break. As soon as we were back in our room, she said, “Tom thinks you’re too attached to me.” When I asked her what that meant exactly, “too attached,” she tried to shrug it off. “It’s just something he said.” I didn’t care what Tom said about me; he was just some boy who barely spoke, his band T-shirts the only interesting thing about him. But it killed me that Jenny deemed it something worth repeating: “too attached.” The implication of what being too attached to another girl might mean made my hair stand on end. I said, “That’s not true,” and Jenny flashed me the same doubtful look she gave me now. Sure, Vanessa. Whatever you say. I didn’t argue further; I shut down, stopped speaking to her, and we fell into the silent standoff that had held until now. Deep down, I knew she was right; I did love her too much, and I couldn’t imagine ever stopping. But less than a year later, here I am, not caring.

She leans over the sink, rinses off the soap, and pats her face dry as she says, “Can I ask you a question? Because I heard something about you.”

I blink, jarred from my memories. “What did you hear?”

“I don’t want to say it. It’s really . . . I know it can’t be true.”

“Just tell me.”

She presses her lips together, searching for the right words. Then in a low voice, she says, “Someone said you were having an affair with Mr. Strane.”

She waits for my reaction, the expected denial, but I am too far away to speak. I’m watching her through the wrong end of a telescope—the towel still pressed to her cheek, her flushed neck. Finally, I manage the words “That’s not true.”

Jenny nods. “I figured.” She turns back to the sink, sets down the towel, and picks up her toothbrush, turns on the water. In my ears, the sound of the tap amplifies to an ocean. The bathroom itself seems to turn watery, the tiled walls undulating.

She spits into the sink, turns off the tap, looks to me expectantly. “Right?” she prompts.

When had she been talking? While brushing her teeth? I shake my head; my mouth flops open. Jenny studies me, something unspooling behind her eyes.

“It is kind of weird,” she says, “the way you always stay in his room after class.”

Strane starts appearing everywhere, like he’s trying to keep an eye on me. He shows up in the dining hall and watches me from the faculty table. He’s in the library during study hour, browsing the bookcase directly in front of me. He walks past the open classroom door during my French class, stealing a glance at me each time. I know I’m being surveilled, but it also feels like being pursued, oppressive and flattering all at once.

One Saturday night I’m in bed, hair damp from the shower, homework laid out before me. The dorm is quiet; there’s an indoor track meet, an away basketball game, and a ski meet at Sugarloaf. I’m dozing off when the sound of a knock jolts me out of bed, my books falling to the floor. Throwing open the door, I half expect Strane to be there, for him to grab my hand and lead me to his car, his house, his bed. But there is only the lit-up hallway of closed doors, empty in either direction.

Another afternoon he asks me where I went during lunch. It’s five p.m. and we’re in the office behind his classroom, the rest of the humanities building now empty and dark. The office is barely bigger than a closet, with just enough room for a table, a chair, and a tweed couch with threadbare arms. It had been full of boxes of old textbooks and long-gone students’ papers, but he cleaned the room out specifically for us to use. It’s the perfect hideaway—two locked doors between us and the hallway.

I tuck my feet up onto the couch. “I went back to my room. I had bio homework.”

“I thought I saw you sneak off with someone,” he says.

“Definitely not.”

He settles into the other end of the couch, pulls my legs onto his lap, and plucks a paper from the to-be-graded stack on the table. We sit in silence for a while, him marking up the papers and me reading my history homework, until he says, “I just want to be sure that the boundaries you and I have established are holding strong.”

I eye him, unsure what he’s getting at.

“I know how tempting it might be to confide in a friend.”

“I don’t have friends.”

He sets his pen and paper down on the table and takes my feet in his hands, rubbing them at first, and then he wraps his fingers around my ankles. “I trust you, I do. But do you understand how important it is that we keep this secret?”

“Duh.”

“I need you to take this seriously.”

“I am taking it seriously.” I try to pull my feet away. He squeezes my ankles so I can’t move.

“I wonder if you really understand the consequences we’d be hit with if we were exposed.” I start to speak. He cuts me off. “Most likely, yes, I’d get fired. But you, too, would be sent packing. Browick wouldn’t want you here after a scandal like that.”

I shoot him a skeptical look. “They wouldn’t kick me out. It wouldn’t be my fault.” Then, not wanting him to think I necessarily believe this, I add, “Meaning technically, because I’m underage.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” he says. “Not to the higher-ups. They root out any and all troublemakers. That’s how these places work.”

He keeps going, his head tipped back, talking up at the ceiling: “If we’re lucky, it wouldn’t go any further than the school, but if law enforcement caught wind of it, I’d almost certainly go to jail. And you’d end up in some foster home.”

“Come on,” I scoff. “I would not go to a foster home.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“You may forget this, but I do actually have parents.”

“Yes, but the state doesn’t like parents who let their child run around with a deviant. Because that’s what they would brand me as, a so-called sex offender. After they arrested me, their next step would be to make you a ward of the state. You’d be shipped off to some hellhole—a group home of kids fresh out of juvie who would do god knows what to you. Your whole future would be out of your hands. You wouldn’t make it to college if that happened. You probably wouldn’t even graduate high school. You may not believe me, Vanessa, but you have no idea how cruel these systems can be. Give them a chance and they’ll do everything in their power to ruin both our lives—”

When he starts talking like this, my brain can’t keep up. It feels like he’s exaggerating, but I get too overwhelmed and lose track of what I believe. He can make even the most outrageous things seem feasible. “I get it,” I say. “I’ll never tell anyone as long as I live. I’ll die before I tell. Ok? I’ll die. Can we please stop talking about this now?”

At that, he snaps out of it, blinking as though he just woke up. He holds out his arms for me to crawl into and cradles me against him. He says “I’m sorry” again and again, so many times the words stop making sense.

“I don’t mean to scare you,” he says. “There’s just so much at stake.”

“I know there is. I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not stupid. I know you’re not.”

The French classes take a weekend trip to Quebec City. We leave in the early morning, boarding a coach bus with plush seats and little TV screens. I sit by a window halfway back and dig my Discman out of my backpack, put in a CD, and try to appear like I don’t care that I’m the only one without a seatmate.

For the first two hours, I stare out the window as the bus drives through foothills and farmland. When we reach the Canadian border, the landscape stays the same but the road signs switch to French. Madame Laurent shoots up out of her seat at the front of the bus and calls for our attention. “Regardez!” She points to each passing sign and prompts us to read them out loud. “Ouest, arrêt . . .”

Somewhere in rural Quebec we stop at a Tim Hortons for a bathroom break. There’s a pay phone out front and I have two prepaid phone cards in my pocket from Strane with instructions to call if I get lonely. The receiver in my hand, I start to dial when Jesse Ly walks out of the Tim Hortons, wearing a long black coat that fans out around him, practically a cape, followed a ways behind by Mike and Joe Russo, who smirk, nudge each other, and don’t even bother lowering their voices as they make fun of him. “Check out the Prince of Darkness,” they say. “It’s the Trench Coat Mafia.” They don’t call him gay, because that would go too far, but it feels like that’s what they’re really making fun of, not his coat. Jesse’s face, his tipped-back chin and clenched jaw, shows he can hear them but is too proud to say anything. Dropping the phone receiver, I hurry over.

“Hey!” I grin at Jesse as though we’re good friends. Behind us, the Russo twins stop laughing, which has less to do with me and more to do with Margo Atherton, who stands by the bus peeling off her sweatshirt, exposing six inches of stomach as her T-shirt rides up, but I still feel like I’ve done a good thing. Jesse says nothing as we board the bus and take our seats. Before we take off, though, he gathers up his stuff and moves down the aisle to me.

“Can I sit here?” he asks, pointing to the empty seat. I pull off my headphones, nod, and move my backpack out of the way. Jesse sits with a sigh, tips his head back. He stays like that until the bus shudders on and drives out of the parking lot, back onto the highway.

“Those guys are morons,” I say.

His eyes snap open and he inhales sharply. “They’re not so bad,” he says, opening his novel and turning his body a little away from me.

“But they were being dicks to you,” I say, as though he might not have realized.

“Really, it’s ok,” he says without looking up from the book. He clutches the pages, chipped black polish on his fingernails.

In Quebec City, Madame Laurent leads us through the cobblestone streets, pointing out the historical architecture—the Notre-Dame Quebec Cathedral, the Château Frontenac. Jesse and I barely acknowledge each other as we hang back from the rest of the group, watch the mimes perform on their big granite pedestals, ride the funicular from upper town to lower town and back again. He buys chintzy souvenirs: a watercolor of the Château Frontenac from an old woman on the street and a spoon with a scene from the Winter Carnival etched on the back, which he offers to me. We catch up with the group an hour later and I expect to be in trouble, but no one even noticed we were gone. For the rest of the afternoon, Jesse and I again sneak away, wandering the Old City streets without talking much, just nudging each other every once in a while to point out something funny or strange.

On the second day of the trip I try calling Strane from a pay phone, but there’s no answer and I don’t dare leave a message. Jesse doesn’t ask me who I’m trying to call, doesn’t need to.

“He’s probably on campus,” he says. “There’s a coffeehouse open mic thing today in the library. They make all the humanities faculty go to them.”

I stare at him as I slide the phone card back in my pocket.

“You don’t have to worry,” he says. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“How do you know?”

He gives me a look, like, Are you kidding? “You’re together all the time. It’s fairly obvious what’s going on. Plus, I saw it up close firsthand.”

I think of what Strane said about foster homes and jails. I’m not sure what I’ve said counts as telling Jesse, but to be sure, I say, “It’s not true.” The words sound so pathetic he just gives me another look. Like, Please.

We leave on Sunday morning. An hour into the bus ride home, Jesse sighs and sets his novel upside down on his lap, looks over at me, motions for me to take off my headphones.

“You know it’s a stupid thing to do, right?” he asks. “Like, unbelievably dumb.”

“What is?”

He gives me a long look. “You and your teacher boyfriend.”

My eyes skim the seats surrounding us, but everyone seems preoccupied—sleeping, or reading, or with their headphones on.

He continues. “It doesn’t really bother me morally or anything. I’m just saying he’ll probably ruin your life.”

I ignore how cleanly his words cut and say it’s worth the risk. I wonder how I sound to him, delusional, brave, or both. Jesse shakes his head.

“What?”

“You’re an idiot,” he says, “that’s all.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I don’t mean that as an insult. I’m an idiot, too, in my own way.”

Jesse saying I’m an idiot reminds me of Strane calling me a dark romantic—both seem to point to an inclination toward bad decision-making. The other day Strane referred to me as a “depressive,” and I looked up the word: a person with a tendency toward melancholy.

A bad storm hits Norumbega and we wake to a glittering campus shrouded in a half inch of ice. Tree limbs bow under the weight, arching toward the ground, and the snow crust is so thick we can walk atop it without our boots breaking through. On a Saturday afternoon, on the couch in Strane’s office, we have sex for the first time in sunlight. Afterward, I avoid looking at his naked body by watching dust motes swirl in the weak winter sun tinged green from the sea glass window. He traces road maps of blue veins on my skin, talks about how hungry I make him, that he’d eat me if he could. I wordlessly offer him my arm. Go ahead. He gives it only a soft-mouthed bite, but I would probably let him tear me apart. I’d let him do anything.

February comes and I am both better and worse at hiding things. I stop bringing up Strane during my Sunday night phone calls home, but I can’t stay away from his classroom. I’m a permanent fixture there now. Even when other students come in for homework help during faculty service hour, I’m planted at the seminar table, pretending to be absorbed in my work but eavesdropping so intensely my ears burn.

One afternoon when we’re alone, he takes a Polaroid camera from his briefcase and asks if he can take a photo of me at the seminar table. “I want to remember what you look like sitting there,” he says. I immediately start to laugh from nerves. I touch my face and tug at my hair. I hate having my photo taken. “You can say no,” he says, but I see the longing in his eyes, how important this must be. Refusing would break his heart. So I let him snap a few of me, both at the seminar table and sitting behind his desk, another on the couch in the office, my feet tucked up and my notebook open on my lap. He’s so grateful, grinning as he watches them develop. He says he’ll treasure them forever.

Another afternoon he brings me a new book to read—Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov. I start to flip through as soon as he gives it to me, but it doesn’t look like a novel; the pages show a long poem, a series of footnotes.

“It’s a difficult book,” Strane explains. “Less accessible than Lolita. It’s the type of novel that asks the reader to relinquish control. You have to experience it rather than try to understand it. Postmodernism . . .” He trails off, seeing the disappointment on my face. I wanted another Lolita.

“Let me show you something.” He takes the paperback from my hands, flips to a page, and points to a stanza. “Look, it seems to reference you.”

My breath catches; my face goes hot.

“Uncanny, isn’t it?” He smiles down at the page. “My dark Vanessa, worshipped and caressed.” He smooths his hand down my hair, twirls a lock around his finger. Crimson-barred, maple-red hair. I think of what I said when he showed me the Jonathan Swift poem, about all this feeling destined. I hadn’t really meant it then. I said it only to show him how happy and willing I was. But seeing my name on the page this time feels like a free fall, a loss of control. Maybe this really was predetermined. Maybe I was made for this.

We’re still huddled over the book, Strane’s hand resting on my back, when old, balding Mr. Noyes walks into the classroom. We dart off in opposite directions, me back to the seminar table and Strane behind his desk, obviously caught. But Mr. Noyes seems unbothered. He laughs and says to Strane, “I see you’ve got a classroom pet,” as though it’s no big deal. It makes me wonder if we have to worry so much about getting caught. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the school finds out. They could give Strane a slap on the wrist, tell him to hold off until I graduate and turn eighteen.

When Mr. Noyes leaves, I ask Strane, “Have other students and teachers done this?”

“Done what?”

“This.”

He looks up from his desk. “It’s been known to happen.”

He turns back to reading as the next question rests heavy on my tongue. Before I let it out, I look down at my hands. I imagine the answer laid out plainly on his face and don’t want to see it. I don’t really want to know.

“What about you? Have you, with another student?”

“Do you think I have?” he asks.

I look up, caught off guard. I don’t know what I think. I know what I want to believe, what I have to believe, but I have no idea how those things align with what might’ve happened in all the years before me. He’s been a teacher for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

Strane watches as I grapple for words, a smile creeping across his face. Finally, he says, “The answer is no. Even if I had moments of desire, it never would’ve seemed worth the risk. Not until you came along.”

I try to hide how happy this makes me feel by rolling my eyes, but his words break my chest wide open and leave me helpless. There’s nothing stopping him from reaching in and grabbing whatever he wants. I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.

I’m reading Pale Fire when Ms. Thompson knocks on my door for curfew check. She peeks her head around the door, her makeup off, hair tied up in a scrunchie; she sees me and checks my name off her list.

“Vanessa, hey.” She steps into the room. “Remember to sign out before you leave on Friday, ok? You forgot before Christmas break.”

She takes a step closer and I dog-ear the page I’m reading, close the novel. I feel light-headed from finding more evidence of myself in the text: the town where the main character lives is “New Wye.”

“How’s the homework?” she asks.

I’ve never asked Strane about Ms. Thompson. Since the Halloween dance, I haven’t seen them together, and I remember how, after he and I had sex for the first time, he said it had been a while since he’d “been intimate.” If they never had sex, then they were only friends, so there’s no need for me to be jealous. I know all that. Still, when I’m around her a meanness takes over me, an urge to give her a glimpse of what I’ve done, what I’m capable of.