Staring across the lake, sunlight streaming in rays straight to the bottom, I can see the sunken logs left from a hundred years ago, back when the lake and the woods surrounding it were owned by a lumber mill. Closer to shore, sunfish guard their egg nests, perfect circles of sand laboriously cleared with their tail fins. Damselflies dart over the water, their long bodies fused, looking for a safe place to mate. Two of them land on my forearm, electric blue bodies, transparent wings.
“Seems like you’re doing better,” Dad says.
That’s how we talk about Strane now, Browick, everything that happened—evasive references. This is the closest anyone ever comes to mentioning it. Dad keeps his eyes on Babe back onshore, doesn’t look over to check my response. I notice he does that a lot now, avoids looking at me, and I know it’s because of what happened, but I tell myself it’s because I lived away at school for two years, because I’m older, because what father wants to look at his teenage daughter in a saggy swimsuit.
I say nothing, stare down at the damselflies. I do feel better, or at least better than I did a month ago when I left Browick, but admitting it feels too much like moving on.
“Might as well get this over with.” He stands, dives into the water. When his head pokes back up, he lets out a whoop. “Judas Priest, that’s cold.” He looks toward me. “You getting in?”
“I’ll wait a few minutes.”
“Suit yourself.”
I watch him move through the water back to shore, where Babe waits, ready to lick the droplets off his shins. I close my eyes and hear the water lapping against the sides of the float, the dee-dee-dee calls of the chickadee, the wood thrush and mourning dove. When I was younger, my parents used to say I sounded like a mourning dove, always sulking, always so damn sad.
When I dive in, the cold is such a shock that for a split second I can’t swim, can’t move, my body careening toward the green-black bottom, but then—the gentle pull back to the surface, my face turned upward, toward the sun.
As I walk across the yard to the house, my stomach sinks when I see Mom’s car in the driveway. Home from work, she’s picked up a pizza. “Grab a plate,” Dad says. He folds his slice in half, takes a big bite.
Mom drops her purse onto the counter, kicks off her shoes, and notices me in my swimsuit and with wet hair. “Vanessa, for god’s sake, get a towel. You’re dripping all over the floor.”
I ignore her and inspect the pizza, globs of sausage and cheese. Even though I’m so hungry my hands are shaky, I make a face. “Yuck. Look at that grease. Disgusting.”
“Fine,” Mom says. “Don’t eat it.”
Sensing a fight, Dad moves out of the kitchen, into the living room and the escape of the TV.
“What should I eat instead? Everything in this house is inedible.”
She touches two fingers to her forehead. “Vanessa, please. I’m not in the mood.”
I throw open a cupboard door, take out a can. “Corned beef hash that’s”—I check the date—“two years expired. Wow. Yum.”
Mom grabs the can, throws it in the garbage. She turns, goes into the bathroom, and slams the door.
Later, when I’m in bed with my notebook, writing down the scenes that never stop replaying in my head—Strane touching me for the first time behind his desk, the nights I spent at his house, the afternoons in his office—Mom comes up with two slices of pizza. She sets the plate on my nightstand, sits on the edge of the bed.
“Maybe we could take a trip down the coast this weekend,” she says.
“And do what?” I mumble. I don’t look up from my notebook, but I can feel her hurt. She’s trying to pull me back into being a kid, back when she and I never needed to do anything, when we’d just get in the car and head out, happy to be together.
She looks down at the notebook pages, tilts her head to see what I’m writing. Classroom and desk and Strane repeat over and over.
I flip over the notebook. “Do you mind?”
“Vanessa,” she sighs.
We stare each other down, her eyes traveling my face, searching for the changes in me, or maybe for a sign of something familiar. She knows. That’s all I can think whenever she looks at me—she knows. At first I was scared she would contact Browick or the police, or at least tell Dad. For weeks, every time the phone rang, my body braced itself for the inevitable fallout. But it never happened. She’s keeping my secret.
“If nothing happened,” she says, “you need to figure out a way to let it go.”
She pats my hand as she gets up, ignores how I jerk out of reach. She leaves my bedroom door open halfway and I get up to shove it closed.
Let it go. When I first realized she wasn’t going to tell anyone, I was relieved, but now, it’s started to flatten out into something like disappointment. Because the deal seems to be, if you want me to keep this secret, then we have to pretend it never happened—and I can’t do that. I’ll remember everything as hard as I can. I’ll live inside these memories until I can see him again.
The summer stretches on. At night, I lie in bed and listen to the loons scream. During the day, while my parents are at work, I walk the dirt road and pick wild raspberries to cook in pancakes that I drench in syrup and eat until I feel sick. I lie in the yard, facedown in the crabgrass, and listen to Babe lope around in the lake, looking for fish. The spray of water droplets on my back as she shakes herself dry, her nose nudging the back of my neck as though to ask if I’m ok.
I choose to think of this as the lull in my story, a period of banishment that tests my loyalties but will ultimately make me stronger. I’ve accepted that I cannot contact Strane, at least not any time soon. Even if my parents weren’t checking the caller ID and phone bill, I imagine lines being tapped, emails monitored. One phone call from me and he could be fired. The cops could show up at his door. It’s strange to think of myself as that dangerous, but look at what already happened—I barely opened my mouth and brought us to the brink of disaster.
All I can do is suffer through. Paddle the canoe into the middle of the lake and let it drift back to shore, read Lolita for the millionth time and scrutinize Strane’s faded annotations. Stare down page 140, when Humbert and Lo are in the car the morning after they have sex for the first time, where a line is underlined in what looks like fresher ink: “It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Think of Strane driving me back to campus after the first night at his house, how closely he studied me when he asked if I was ok. Scrawl in my notebook, “Jailbait” means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch.
I dread August, because once the Browick move-in date passes, I can no longer pretend there’s a chance this will fix itself, that I might wake up that morning to the truck packed, my parents crying out, “Surprise! It’s all been worked out. Of course you’re going back!” On the morning of move-in day, I wake to an empty house, my parents both at work. A note on the kitchen counter tells me to vacuum, do the dishes, brush Babe, water the tomato and zucchini plants. Still in my sleep shorts and T-shirt, I throw on sneakers and take off into the woods. I run straight up the bluff, underbrush scraping my shins. When I reach the top, gasping for breath, I look out over the lake, the mountain, that long, low whale’s back rising from the earth. The endless woods interrupted only by a wisp of highway, big rigs gliding like toys on a track. I think of stepping into an empty dorm room, the sun draped across a bare mattress, finding someone else’s initials carved on the windowsill. I imagine a new class taking their seats around the seminar table while Strane looks on, thinking of me.
My new high school is a long one-story building that was hurriedly built in the sixties to accommodate all the baby boomers and hasn’t been updated since. It shares a parking lot with a strip mall that has a discount grocery store, a laundromat, a telemarketing center where people sell credit cards, and a diner that still allows people to smoke.
It’s the opposite of Browick in every possible way. Carpeted classrooms, pep rallies, kids in T-shirts and jeans, voc classes, cafeteria trays of chicken nuggets and slab pizza, classrooms so crowded they can’t fit another desk. On the drive in that morning, Mom says it’s good I’m starting on the first day of a new school year, that I’ll blend right in, but as I walk the hallways it’s clear I’ve been marked. Kids I recognize from middle school avert their eyes, while others openly stare. In Honors French 4, the textbook full of lessons I’ve already learned, two boys in the row beside me whisper about a new girl they’ve heard about, a junior, a transfer, a slut who boned a teacher.
At first, I can only blink blindly down at my textbook. Boned?
Then rage rushes through me. Because these boys have no idea the girl they’re talking about is sitting next to them, because I have only two choices and neither is fair—sit and say nothing, or cause a scene and out myself. Maybe the boys assume I’m a senior like them, but more likely is that it doesn’t even cross their minds that I’m the girl in question. From the outside, I must seem ordinary, barefaced and dressed in size ten corduroys. You? they’d ask in disbelief, unable to reconcile me with the slut they had imagined.
On my fourth day, two girls fall into step beside me on the way to the cafeteria. One I know from middle school, Jade Reynolds. Her brown hair is bleached a brassy orange, and she’s ditched the wide-leg jeans and barbell necklaces she used to wear but kept the kohl-rimmed eyes. The other girl, Charley, I recognize from my chemistry class. She’s tall, smells of cigarettes, has hair so bleached it’s almost white. Her hooked nose makes her eyes look slightly crossed, like a Siamese cat.
Jade smiles at me as we walk, a smile that’s less about being nice and more about peering straight into me. “Vanessa, hi,” she says brightly, drawing out her words. “Do you want to eat with us?”
My shoulders hunch reflexively. I shake my head, sensing a trap. “That’s ok.”
Jade ducks her head. “Are you sure?” She keeps smiling that strange searching smile.
“Come on,” Charley says, her voice rough. “Nobody wants to eat alone.”
In the cafeteria, the girls head straight to a table in the corner. I barely sit down before Jade leans across the table, her brown eyes wide.
“So,” she says. “Why did you transfer here?”
“I didn’t like it,” I say. “Boarding school was too expensive.”
Jade and Charley exchange a look.
“We heard you had sex with a teacher,” Jade says.
In a way, it’s a relief to hear the question leveled at me directly—a relief, too, to imagine the story snaking its way across the state, refusing to be left behind. My parents can pretend it never happened but it did, it did.
“Was he hot?” Charley asks. “I’d fuck a hot teacher.”
They watch me curiously as I struggle to answer. Like with the boys in French class, I know what they imagine is way off—a handsome young teacher, like something out of a movie. I wonder what they’d think of me if they saw Strane with his belly and wire-framed glasses.
“So you really did?” Jade asks, a note of incredulity in her voice. She isn’t convinced. I lift my shoulders, not quite affirmation but not a denial, and Charley nods like she understands.
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.
“Isn’t that sad?” Charley asks. “Do you think I’m pathetic?”
I don’t look up from my notebook. “I think you should do whatever you want with whoever you want.”
I look ahead to the next class period on Strane’s schedule—a free hour. I picture him in the office, reclined on the tweed sofa, a stack of ungraded homework on his lap, his thoughts drifting to me.
“See, that’s why I like you,” Charley says. “You’re so chill. We should hang out. Like, for real. Outside of school.”
I glance up from my notebook.
“What about Friday? You can come to the bowling alley.”
“I don’t really like bowling.”
She rolls her eyes. “We don’t actually bowl.”
I ask what it is that they do there, but Charley only grins, ducks her head down toward the gas valve, puckers her lips, moves to turn it on. I grab her hand and she laughs, raspy and loud.