The creative writing club has one other member, Jesse Ly—a junior, Browick’s closest thing to a goth, rumored to be gay. When I walk into the classroom, he sits at the seminar table in front of a stack of papers, his combat boots propped up on a chair, a pen tucked behind his ear. He glances at me but says nothing. I doubt he even knows my name.Mr. Strane, though, jumps up from behind his desk and strides across the room to me. “Here for the club?” he asks.I open my mouth, unsure what to say. If I’d known there would be only one other person I probably wouldn’t have come. I want to back out right then, but Mr. Strane is too delighted, shaking my hand and saying, “You’re going to increase our membership by one hundred percent,” so it feels like I can’t change my mind.He leads me to the seminar table, sits beside me, explains that the stack of papers contains submissions for the lit journal. “It’s all student work,” he says. “Do your best to ignore the names. Read each one carefully, all the way through, before you make a decision.” He says I should write my comments in the margins, then assign each submission a number from one to five, one being a definite no and five a definite yes.Without looking up, Jesse says, “I’ve been doing checks. It’s what we used last year.” He gestures to the papers he’s already gone through; on the upper right corner of each there’s a tiny check, check-minus, or check-plus. Mr. Strane raises his eyebrows, obviously annoyed, but Jesse doesn’t notice. His eyes are fixed on the poem he’s reading.“Whatever method you two decide on is fine,” Mr. Strane says. He smiles at me, winks. As he gets up, he pats my shoulder.With Mr. Strane across the classroom, back behind his desk, I pull a submission from the stack, a short story titled “The Worst Day of Her Life,” by Zoe Green. Zoe was in my algebra class last year. She sat behind me and laughed whenever Seth McLeod called me Big Red as though it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I shake my head and try to push the bias out of my mind. This is why Mr. Strane said not to look at the names.Her story is about a girl in a hospital waiting room whose grandmother dies, and I’m bored by the end of the first paragraph. Jesse catches me flipping to check how many pages there are and in a low voice says, “You really don’t have to read the whole thing if it’s bad. I edited the lit journal last year when Mrs. Bloom was the faculty advisor and she didn’t care.”My eyes dart to Mr. Strane sitting behind his desk, bent over his own stack of papers. Shrugging, I say, “I’ll keep reading. It’s ok.”Jesse squints at the page in my hands. “Zoe Green? Isn’t that the girl who lost it during the debate tournament last year?” It was—Zoe, assigned to argue for the death penalty, broke down in tears during the final round when her opponent, Jackson Kelly, called her position racist and immoral, which probably wouldn’t have rattled her so badly if Jackson weren’t black. After Jackson was declared the tournament winner, Zoe said she’d felt personally attacked by his rebuttal, which was against the debate rules, so they ended up sharing first place, which was bullshit and everyone knew it.Jesse leans forward and pulls Zoe’s story out of my hands, marks a check-minus on the right-hand corner, and tosses it in the “no” pile. “Voilà,” he says.For the rest of the hour while Jesse and I read, Mr. Strane grades papers at his desk at the back of the room, occasionally leaving to make photocopies or get water for the coffeemaker. At one point, he peels an orange and its scent fills the room. At the end of the hour, as I stand to leave, Mr. Strane asks if I’ll come to the next meeting.“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’m still trying out different things.”He smiles and waits until Jesse leaves the room before saying, “I guess this doesn’t offer much for you socially.”“Oh, that doesn’t bother me,” I say. “I’m not exactly a super social person anyway.”“Why’s that?”“I don’t know. I guess I just don’t have a ton of friends.”He nods thoughtfully. “I understand what you mean. I like to be by myself, too.”My first impulse is to say no, I don’t like being by myself at all, but maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m actually a loner by choice, preferring my own company.“Well, I used to be best friends with Jenny Murphy,” I say. “From English class.” The words tumble out, catch me off guard. It’s more than I’ve ever told a teacher, especially a man, but the way he watches me—soft-eyed smile, chin resting on his hand—makes me want to talk, to show myself off.“Ah,” he says. “The little Queen of the Nile.” When I frown, confused, he explains that he means her bobbed haircut, that it makes her look like Cleopatra, and as he says this, I feel a prick of something in my stomach, like jealousy but meaner.“I don’t think her hair looks that good,” I say.Mr. Strane smirks. “So you used to be friends. What changed?”“She started going out with Tom Hudson.”He thinks for a moment. “The boy with the sideburns.”I nod, thinking of how teachers must recognize and categorize us in their minds. I wonder what he might associate with me if someone mentioned Vanessa Wye. The girl with the red hair. That girl who is always alone.“So you suffered a betrayal,” he says, meaning by Jenny.It’s something I haven’t considered before and warmth fills my chest at the idea. I suffered. It wasn’t that I drove her away by feeling too much or getting too attached. No, I was wronged.He gets up and walks to the chalkboard, starts erasing the notes left over from class. “What made you want to try out the club? Weak spot on your résumé?”I nod; it seems ok to be honest with him. “Mrs. Antonova said I should. I do like to write, though.”“What do you write?”“Poems, mostly. They’re not good or anything.”Mr. Strane smiles over his shoulder in a way that is somehow both kind and condescending. “I’d like to read some of your work.”My brain catches on the way he says “your work,” as though the things I write are worth taking seriously. “Sure,” I say. “If you really want to.”“I do want to,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”At that, I feel my face flush. My worst habit, according to my mother, is how I deflect compliments with self-deprecation. I need to learn how to accept praise. It boils down to confidence, she says, or lack thereof.Mr. Strane sets the eraser on the chalk rail and contemplates me from across the room. He slips his hands into his pockets, looks me up and down.“That’s a nice dress,” he says. “I like your style.”I mumble thank you, manners instilled so deep they’re reflexive, and look down at my dress. It’s hunter-green jersey, vaguely A-line but mostly shapeless, and ends above the knee. It’s not stylish; I only wear it because I like the contrast in color against my hair. It seems strange for a middle-aged man to notice girl clothes. My dad barely knows the difference between a dress and a skirt.Mr. Strane turns back to the chalkboard and starts erasing again even though it’s already clean. It almost seems like he’s embarrassed, and part of me wants to thank him again, sincerely this time. Thank you very much, I could say. No one has ever said that to me before. I wait for him to turn back around, but he keeps swiping the eraser back and forth, cloudy streaks across a green expanse.Then, as I edge toward the doorway, he says, “I hope I see you again on Thursday.”“Oh, sure,” I say. “You will.”So I go again on Thursday, and the next Tuesday, and the next Thursday. I become an official member of the club. It takes Jesse and me longer than expected to finish choosing pieces for the lit journal, mostly because I’m so indecisive, going back and changing my vote multiple times. Meanwhile Jesse’s judgment is swift and ruthless, his pen slicing across the page. When I ask him how he can decide so quickly, he says it should be obvious from the first line if something is good or not. One Thursday, Mr. Strane disappears into the office behind his classroom and comes out with a stack of back issues so we can understand what the journal is supposed to look like, even though Jesse was the editor last year so of course he already knows. Thumbing through an issue, I see Jesse’s name listed in the table of contents under “Fiction.”“Hey, there’s you,” I say.At the sight of it, he groans. “Don’t read it in front of me, please.”“Why not?” I skim the first page.“Because I don’t want you to.”I slip the issue into my backpack and forget about it until after dinner, when I’m drowning in incomprehensible geometry homework, eager for a distraction. I take the journal and turn to his story, read it twice. It’s good, really good, better than anything I’ve ever written, better than any of the submissions we read for the journal. When I try to tell him this at the next club meeting, he cuts me off. “Writing isn’t really my thing anymore,” he says.Another afternoon, Mr. Strane shows us how to use the new publishing software to format the issue. Jesse and I sit side by side at the computer while Mr. Strane stands behind us, watching and correcting. At one point when I make a mistake, he reaches down and guides the mouse for me, his hand so big it covers mine completely. His touch makes my whole body go hot. When I make another mistake, he does it again, this time squeezing my hand a little, as though to reassure me that I’ll get the hang of it, but he doesn’t do the same to Jesse, not even when he accidentally x-es out without saving and Mr. Strane has to explain the steps all over again.

Late September arrives and for a week the weather is perfect, sunny and cool. Each morning the leaves are brighter, turning the rolling mountains around Norumbega into a mess of color. Campus looks like it did in the brochure I obsessed over as I filled out my Browick application—students in sweaters, the lawns a brilliant green, golden hour setting white clapboard aglow. I should enjoy it, but instead the weather makes me restless, panicked. After classes I’m unable to settle down, moving from the library to the Gould common area to my dorm room and back to the library. Everywhere makes me antsy to be someplace else.

One afternoon I loop through campus three times, unsatisfied with all the places I try—the library too dark, my messy dorm room too depressing, everywhere else crowded with people studying in groups that only highlight me being alone, always alone—before I force myself to stop at the grassy slope behind the humanities building. Calm down, breathe.

I lean against the solitary maple tree that my eyes drift to during English class and touch the back of my hand to my hot cheeks. I’m so worked up I’m sweating, and it’s only fifty degrees.

This is fine, I think. Just work here and calm down.

I sit with my back against the tree and reach into my backpack, feeling past my geometry textbook to my spiral notebook, thinking I’ll feel better if I work on a poem first, but when I open to my latest one, a couple of stanzas about a girl trapped on an island who calls sailors to shore, I read over the lines and realize they’re bad—clumsy, disjointed, practically incoherent. And I thought these lines were good. How did I think they were good? They’re blatantly bad. Probably all my poems are bad. I curl into myself and grind the heels of my hands against my eyelids until I hear footsteps approach, crunching leaves and cracking twigs. I look up and a towering silhouette blocks out the sun.

“Hello there,” it says.

I shield my eyes—Mr. Strane. His expression changes when he notices my face, my red-rimmed eyes. “You’re upset,” he says.

Gazing up at him, I nod. There doesn’t seem to be any use in lying.

“Would you rather be left alone?” he asks.

I hesitate, then shake my head no.

He lowers himself to the ground beside me, leaving a few feet between us. His long legs are stretched out, the outline of his knees visible beneath his trousers. He keeps his eyes on me, watches as I wipe my eyes.

“I didn’t mean to impose. I spied you from the window there, thought I’d say hello.” He points behind us, to the humanities building. “Can I ask what’s upsetting you?”

I take a breath, try to work out the words, but after a moment I shake my head. “It’s too big to explain,” I say. Because it’s about more than my poem being bad, or that I can’t pick a study spot without exhausting myself. It’s a darker feeling, a fear of there being something wrong with me that I won’t ever be able to fix.

I expect Mr. Strane to let it go at that. Instead, he waits the same way he’d wait in class for a response to a tough question. Of course it seems too big to explain, Vanessa. That’s how hard questions are meant to make you feel.

Taking a breath, I say, “This time of year just makes me feel nuts. Like I’m running out of time or something. Like I’m wasting my life.”

Mr. Strane blinks. I can tell this isn’t what he expected me to say. “Wasting your life,” he echoes.

“I know that doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it does. It makes perfect sense.” He leans back on his hands, tilts his head. “You know, if you were my age, I’d say it sounds like you’re in the beginning of a midlife crisis.”

He smiles and, without meaning to, my face mirrors him. He grins, I grin.

“It looked like you were writing,” he says. “Were you getting good work done?”

I lift my shoulders, unsure if I want to call my writing good. It seems boastful, not for me to say.

“Would you show me what you’ve written?”

“No way.” I clutch my notebook in my hands, hold it closer to my chest, and in his eyes I see a flash of alarm, like my sudden movement has scared him. I steady myself and add, “It’s just not finished.”

“Is writing ever really finished?”

That feels like a trick question. I think for a moment, then say, “Some writing can be more finished than other writing.”

He smiles; he likes that. “Do you have something more finished you can show me?”

I loosen my grip and open the notebook’s front cover. It’s full of mostly half-finished poems, lines scrawled out and rewritten. I thumb through recent pages to find the one I’ve been working on for a couple weeks. It isn’t finished, but it isn’t terrible. I hand him the notebook, hoping he won’t notice the doodles in the margins, the flowering vine crawling along the spine.

He holds the notebook carefully in both hands, and just seeing that, my notebook in his hands, sends a jolt through me. No one else has ever touched my notebook before, let alone read anything in it. At the end of the poem, he says, “Huh.” I wait for a clearer reaction, for him to let me know if he thinks it’s good or not, but he only says, “I’m going to read it again.”

When he finally looks up and says, “Vanessa, this is lovely,” I exhale so loudly, I laugh. “How long did you work on this?” he asks.

Thinking it’s more impressive to come across as an instantaneous genius, I shrug out a lie. “Not long.”

“You said you write often.” He hands the notebook back to me.

“Every day, usually.”

“It shows. You’re very good. I say that as a reader, not a teacher.”

I’m so delighted, I laugh again, and Mr. Strane smiles his tender-condescending smile. “Is that funny?” he asks.

“No, that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.”

“You’re kidding. That’s nothing. I could say much nicer things.”

“It’s just I never really let anyone read my . . .” I almost say stuff but instead try out the word he used. “My work.”

A silence settles between us. He leans back on his hands and studies the view: the picturesque downtown, distant river, and rolling hills. I look back to my notebook, eyes turned down at its pages but seeing nothing. I’m too aware of his body next to mine, his sloping torso and stomach straining against his shirt, long legs crossed at the ankle, how one of his pant legs has bunched up, revealing a half inch of skin above his hiking boot. Worried he might get up and leave, I try to think of something to say to keep him here, but before I can, he plucks a fallen red maple leaf off the ground, spins it by its stem, considers it for a moment, and then holds it up to my face.

“Look at that,” he says. “It matches your hair perfectly.”

I freeze, feel my mouth fall open. He holds the maple leaf there a beat longer, its points brushing against my hair. Then, shaking his head a little, he drops his hand and the leaf falls to the ground. He stands—again blocking out the sun—wipes his hands on his thighs, and walks back to the humanities building without saying goodbye.

When he disappears, a mania seizes me, a need to flee. I snap my notebook shut, grab my backpack, and start off toward the dorm, but then think better and double back to scan the ground for the exact leaf he held up to my hair. Once it’s safe, tucked between the pages of my notebook, I move across campus as though airborne, barely making contact with the earth between strides. It isn’t until I’m back in my room that I remember he said he saw me from his window, and I squeeze my eyes shut against the thought of him back in the classroom, watching me search for the leaf.

I go home the next weekend for Dad’s birthday. Mom’s gift to him is a yellow Labrador puppy from the shelter, the reason for owner surrender listed as “pigment too pale.” Dad names the puppy Babe, after the pig movie, because she looks like a piglet with her fat belly and pink nose. Our last dog died over the summer, a twelve-year-old shepherd Dad found as a stray in town, so we’ve never had a puppy before, and I fall in love so hard I carry her around all weekend like a baby, rubbing her jelly-bean paw pads and smelling her sweet breath.

At night after my parents go to bed, I stand in front of my bedroom mirror, study my face and hair and try to see myself as Mr. Strane sees me, a girl with maple-red hair who wears nice dresses and has good style, but I can’t get past the sight of myself as a pale, freckled child.

When Mom and I drive back to Browick, Dad stays home with Babe, and in the closed-off space of the car, my chest burns from wanting to tell. But what is there to tell? He touched my hand a couple times, said something about my hair?

As we drive across the bridge into town, I ask in my most casual voice, “Have you ever noticed my hair is the color of maple leaves?”

Mom looks over at me, surprised. “Well, there are different kinds of maple,” she says, “and they all turn different colors in the fall. There’s sugar, there’s striped, there’s red. And depending how north you are, there’s mountain maple—”

“Never mind. Forget it.”

“Since when are you interested in trees?”

“I was talking about my hair, not trees.”

She asks who told me my hair looked like maple leaves, but she doesn’t sound suspicious. Her voice is soft, like she thinks it’s sweet.

“No one,” I say.

“Someone must have said it to you.”

“I can’t notice something like that about myself?”

We stop at a red light. On the radio, a voice reads the top-of-the-hour news headlines.

“If I tell you,” I say, “you have to promise not to overreact.”

“I would never.”

I give her a long look. “Promise.”

“All right,” she says. “I promise.”

I take a breath. “A teacher said it to me. That my hair is the color of red maple leaves.” There’s a giddy relief as I say the words; I nearly let out a laugh.

Mom narrows her eyes. “A teacher?” she asks.

“Mom, watch the road.”

“Was it a man?”

“What does it matter?”

“A teacher shouldn’t be saying that to you. Who was it?”

“Mom.”

“I want to know.”

“You promised you wouldn’t overreact.”

She presses her lips together, as though to calm herself. “It’s a strange thing to tell a fifteen-year-old girl, that’s all I’m saying.”