Thanksgiving break. Five days of showers that last until the hot water runs out, of scrutinizing myself in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door, plucking my eyebrows until Mom hides the tweezers, of trying to get the puppy to love me as much as Dad. I go for hikes every day, wearing a blaze-orange vest as I trek up the granite bluff that looms over the lake. Caves pock the face of it, crevices in the rock big enough for hawks to nest in and animals to hide.Inside the biggest cave is an army-style cot. It’s been there as long as I can remember, left behind by some long-ago rock climber. I stare at the cot’s metal frame and rotten canvas bed and think of the first day of class when Mr. Strane said he knew Whalesback Lake, how he’d been here before. I imagine him finding me now, all alone and deep in the woods. He’d be free to do whatever he wanted with me, no chance of getting caught.In the evenings I read Lolita in bed, mindlessly eating my way through a sleeve of saltines and propping up a pillow to hide the cover in case my parents open my bedroom door. While wind rattles the windowpane, I turn the pages and feel a slow burn within me, hot coals, deep red embers. It isn’t only the plot, its story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her. It’s that he gave it to me. There’s now a whole new context to what we’re doing, new insight into what he might want from me. What conclusion is there to draw besides the obvious? He is Humbert, and I am Dolores.For Thanksgiving we go to my grandparents’ house in Millinocket. It’s unchanged from 1975, with its shag carpet and sunburst clocks, the smell of cigarettes and coffee brandy hanging in the air even with a turkey in the oven. My grandfather gives me a roll of Necco Wafers and a five-dollar bill; my grandmother asks if I’ve gained weight. We eat root vegetables and dinner rolls from the store, lemon meringue pie with browned peaks that Dad picks off when nobody’s looking.On the drive home the car lurches over frost heaves and through potholes, an endless wall of pitch-black woods on either side. The radio plays hits from the seventies and eighties, Dad tapping the steering wheel along to “My Sharona” while Mom sleeps, her head leaning against the window. “Such a dirty mind / I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” I watch his fingers tap to the beat as the chorus comes around again. Does he even hear what the song is about, what he’s humming along to? “Get it up for the touch of the younger kind.” It’s enough to make me crazy, seeing these things that no one else ever seems to notice.The first night back after Thanksgiving break, I eat dinner at the empty end of a table, Lucy and Deanna gossiping a few seats away about some popular girl, a senior, who supposedly went to the Halloween dance on drugs. Aubrey Dana asks what kind of drugs.Deanna hesitates, then answers, “Coke.”Aubrey shakes her head. “No one has coke here,” she says.Deanna doesn’t argue; Aubrey is from New York, which makes her an authority.It takes me a minute to realize they’re talking about cocaine and not soda, the sort of thing that normally makes me feel like a yokel, but now their gossip strikes me as sad. Who cares if someone came to a dance on drugs? Don’t they have better things to talk about? I stare down at my peanut butter sandwich and let myself detach, retreat into the ending of Lolita that I just reread, that final scene of Humbert bloodstained and dazed, and still in love with Lo, even after how much she hurt him and how much he hurt her. His feelings for her are endless and out of his control. How can they not be, when the whole world demonizes him for them? If he were able to stop loving her, he would. His life would be so much easier if he left her alone.Picking at the crust of my sandwich, I try to see things from Mr. Strane’s perspective. He’s probably scared—no, terrified. I’ve been wrapped up in my own frustration and impatience, never considering all that was on the line for him or how much he’s already risked touching my leg, saying he wanted to kiss me. He hadn’t known what my reaction would be to these things. What if I’d been offended, told on him? Maybe all along he’s been the brave one and I’ve been selfish.Because, really, what risk is there for me? If I make a move toward him and he turns me down, I suffer nothing beyond a minor humiliation. Big deal. Life for me goes on uninterrupted. It isn’t fair to expect him to be more vulnerable than he already has been. At the very least, I need to meet him in the middle, show him what I want and that I’m willing to let the world demonize me, too.Back in my room, I lie in bed and flip through Lolita until I find the line I’m looking for on page 17. Humbert, describing the qualities of the nymphet hidden among ordinary girls: “she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”I have power. Power to make it happen. Power over him. I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

Before American lit, I stop in the bathroom to check my face. I’m wearing makeup; I piled on every single product I own that morning and parted my hair on the side rather than in the middle. It’s enough of a change that the face in the mirror seems unfamiliar—a girl from a magazine or a music video. Britney Spears tapping her foot against her desk as she waits for the bell to ring. The longer I stare at myself, the more my features fracture. A pair of green eyes drift away from a freckled nose; a pair of sticky pink lips separate and swim in different directions. One blink and everything scrambles back into place.I spend so long in the bathroom I’m late to English for the first time ever. As I rush into the classroom, I feel eyes on me and assume they’re Mr. Strane’s, but when I look through my heavy eyelashes, I see it’s Jenny, her pen frozen above her notes as she registers the changes in me, the makeup and hair.We’re reading Edgar Allan Poe that day, which is so perfectly appropriate I want to throw my head down on the table and laugh.“Didn’t he marry his cousin?” Tom asks.“He did,” Mr. Strane says. “Technically.”Hannah Levesque scrunches her nose. “Gross.”Mr. Strane says nothing about what I know would disgust the rest of them even more, that Virginia Clemm wasn’t just Poe’s cousin; she was thirteen years old. He has each of us read aloud a stanza from “Annabel Lee,” and my voice is unsteady as I say the lines “I was a child and she was a child.” Images of Lolita crowd my head and mix with the memory of Mr. Strane whispering, You and I are the same, as he stroked my knee.Toward the end of the period, he tips back his head, closes his eyes, and recites the poem “Alone” from memory, his deep, drawn-out voice making the lines “I could not bring / My passions from a common spring” sound like a song. Listening to him, I want to cry. I see him so clearly now, understand how lonely it must be for him, wanting the wrong thing, the bad thing, while living in a world that would surely villainize him if it knew.At the end of class, after everyone else has left, I ask if I can shut the door and don’t wait for him to answer before pulling it closed. It feels like the bravest thing I’ve ever done. He’s at the chalkboard, eraser in hand, shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows. He looks me up and down.“You look a bit different today,” he says.I say nothing, just tug at my sweater sleeves and roll my ankles.“It’s as though you’ve aged five years over the break,” he adds, setting down the eraser and wiping his hands. He gestures to the paper I’m holding. “Is that for me?”I nod. “It’s a poem.”When I give it to him, he starts to read it right away, doesn’t lift his eyes even as he walks to his desk and sits down. Without asking, I follow and sit beside him. I finished the poem last night but tweaked the lines throughout the day, making them more like Lolita, more suggestive.

Mr. Strane sets the poem on his desk and leans back in his chair, almost like he wants to distance himself from it. “You never title these,” he says, his voice sounding far away. “You should title them.” A minute passes and he doesn’t move or speak, only stares down at the poem.Sitting there in silence, I’m smacked with the awful feeling that he’s tired of me, wants me to leave him alone. It makes me squeeze my eyes shut from embarrassment—for writing the blatantly sexy poem and thinking I could scheme and don a costume to get what I want, for reading too much into him loaning me a book and saying a few nice things. I saw what I wanted to see, convinced myself my fantasies were real. Sniffling like a little kid, I whisper that I’m sorry.“Hey,” he says, suddenly soft. “Hey, why are you sorry?”“Because,” I say, sucking in a breath. “Because I’m an idiot.”“Why say that?” His arm is around my shoulders, pulling me in. “You’re nothing of the sort.”When I was nine, I fell from the last tree I ever tried to climb. Him holding me feels just like that fall—how the earth came up to meet me rather than the other way around, the way the ground seemed to swallow me in the moments after landing. He and I are so close, if I tilt my head a few degrees, my cheek presses against his shoulder. I breathe in the wool of his sweater, the coffee and chalk dust smell of his skin, my mouth mere inches from his neck.We stay like that, his arm holding me and my head against his shoulder, while laughter drifts in from the hallway and the downtown church bells mark the half hour. My knees press into his thigh; the back of my hand grazes his pant leg. Breathing shallow breaths into his neck, I will him to do something.Then a small motion: his thumb strokes my shoulder.I lift my face so my mouth almost touches his neck and I feel him swallow once, twice. It’s how he swallows—like he’s pushing something down within him—that gives me the courage to press my lips against his skin. It’s only a half kiss, but he shudders from it, and the feel of that makes me swell like a wave.He kisses the top of my head then, his own half kiss, and again I press my mouth against his neck. It’s a dialogue of half actions, neither of us fully committed. There’s still a chance to turn away, change our minds. Half kisses can be forgotten but full kisses cannot. His hand squeezes my shoulder, tight and tighter, and something within my own body begins to rise. I struggle to force it down, worried that if I don’t, I might leap forward, grab him by the throat, and ruin the whole thing.Then, without warning, he lets go. He draws away from me and then we aren’t touching at all. Behind his glasses, he blinks as though adjusting to new light. “We should talk about this,” he says.“Ok.”“This is serious.”“I know.”“We’re breaking a lot of rules.”“I know,” I say, annoyed at the idea of him thinking I don’t realize this, that I haven’t already spent hours trying to figure out exactly how serious this is.He looks me over, his face bewildered and hard. Under his breath, he mutters, “This is unreal.”The second hand on the classroom clock ticks by. It’s still faculty service hour. The door is closed, but technically someone could come in at any moment.“So, what is it that you want to do?” he asks.It’s too big of a question. What I want depends on what he wants. “I don’t know.”He turns toward the windows, crosses his arms over his chest. I don’t know isn’t a good answer. It’s what a child would say, not someone willing and capable of making up her own mind.“I like being with you,” I say. He waits for me to offer more, and my eyes move around the classroom as I struggle for the right words. “I also like what we do.”“What do you mean, ‘what we do’?” He wants me to say it, but I don’t know what to call it.I gesture at the space between our bodies. “This.”Smiling faintly, he says, “I like that, too. What about this?” He leans forward and touches the tips of his fingers to my knee. “Do you like this?”Watching my face, his fingertips slide up my leg and keep sliding until they brush the crotch of my tights. Reflexively, my legs clamp together, trapping his hand.“That was too far,” he acknowledges.I shake my head, relax my legs. “It’s ok.”“It’s not ok.” His hand slips out from under my skirt and he slides like liquid out of his chair and onto the floor. Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, “I’m going to ruin you.”It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened so far, more surreal than him saying he wanted to kiss me or his hand stroking my leg. “I’m going to ruin you.” He says it with obvious torment, a glimpse into how much he’s thought about it, wrestled with it. He wants to do the right thing, doesn’t want to hurt me, but has resigned himself to the likelihood that he will.With my hands hanging in midair above him, I take in his details: black hair, gray at the temples; the smooth grain of his beard ending at a clean-shaven line under his jaw. There’s a small cut on his neck, slightly inflamed, and I imagine him that morning in his bathroom, razor in hand, while I stood barefoot in my dorm room, smearing makeup on my face.“I want to be a positive presence in your life,” he says. “Someone you can look back on and remember fondly, the funny old teacher who was pathetically in love with you but kept his hands to himself and was a good boy in the end.”His head still heavy in my lap, my legs start to shake, my armpits and the backs of my knees break into a sweat. “Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.“Some days I sit in your chair after you leave class. I rest my head on the table like I’m trying to breathe you in.” He lifts his head from my lap, rubs his face, and sits back on his heels. “What the fuck is the matter with me? I can’t tell you this. I’m going to give you nightmares.”He hefts himself back into his chair, and I know I have to offer something to convince him I’m not afraid. I need to match him, show he isn’t alone. “I think about you all the time,” I say.For a moment, his face brightens. He catches himself and scoffs. “Like hell you do.”“All the time. I’m obsessed.”“That I find hard to believe. Beautiful girls don’t fall in love with lecherous old men.”“You aren’t lecherous.”“Not yet,” he says, “but if I make another move toward you, I will be.”He needs more, so I give more. I tell him I write my stupid poems just so he’ll read them (“Your poems are not stupid,” he says. “Please don’t call them that.”), that I spent all Thanksgiving break reading Lolita and feel changed because of it, that I dressed up today for him, that I shut the classroom door because I wanted us to be alone.“And I thought we might . . .” I trail off.“We might what?”I roll my eyes, titter out a laugh. “You know.”“I don’t.”Swiveling slightly in the chair, I say, “That we might, I don’t know, kiss or something.”“You want me to kiss you?”I lift my shoulders and duck my head so my hair falls over my face, too embarrassed to say it.“Is that a yes?”Behind my hair, I give a little grunt.“Have you been kissed before?” He pushes back my hair so he can see me, and I shake my head no, too nervous to lie.He gets up and locks the classroom door, turns off the lights so no one can look in through the windows. When he takes my face in his hands, I close my eyes and keep them closed. His lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun. His beard is softer than I expected, but his glasses hurt. They dig into my cheeks.There’s one close-lipped kiss, then another. He makes a wordless hmm sound and then there’s an open kiss that goes on for a while. I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else. The whole time all I can think about is how weird it is that he has a tongue.Afterward, my teeth won’t stop chattering. I want to be fearless, to smirk and say something flirty and coy, but all I can do is wipe my nose on my sleeve and whisper, “I feel really weird.”He kisses my forehead, my temples, the corner of my jaw. “A good weird, I hope.”I know I should say yes, reassure him, give him no reason to doubt how much I want it, but I only stare off into middle distance until he leans forward and kisses me again.

I sit at my usual place at the seminar table, my palms flat on the tabletop to keep myself from touching the raw skin at the corners of my mouth. Other students filter in, unzipping their coats and pulling copies of Ethan Frome out of their backpacks. They don’t know what happened, can never know, but still I want to scream it. Or, if I can’t scream it, I want to press the heels of my hands against the table, break through the wood until the whole thing cracks apart and the splintered pieces fall in such a way that the secret spells out across the floor.On the other side of the table, Tom leans back, stretching his arms behind his head so his shirt rides up, showing a couple inches of his stomach. Jenny’s chair is empty. Before Tom came in, Hannah Levesque said something about them breaking up, gossip that would have sent me reeling two months ago. Now it barely registers. Two months feels like a lifetime.During class, as Mr. Strane lectures on Ethan Frome, there’s a slight tremble in his hands, a reluctance to look my way—or no, it’s ridiculous now to think of him as “mister.” But the thought of calling him by his first name seems wrong, too. At one point he touches his hand to his forehead, loses his train of thought, something I’ve never seen him do before.“Right,” he mumbles. “Where was I?”The clock above the doorframe ticks two, three, four seconds. Hannah Levesque makes some painfully obvious point about the novel, and instead of brushing her off, Strane says, “Yes, exactly.” Turning to the chalkboard, he writes in big letters, Who is to blame? and an ocean roars in my ears.He talks about the whole plot of the novel even though we only had to read the first fifty pages for class. The allure of young Mattie and the moral conundrum the older, married Ethan finds himself in. Is Ethan’s love for her really wrong? He lives in desolation. All he has is sickly Zeena upstairs. “People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,” Strane says, with so much sincerity in his voice there are ripples of laughter around the seminar table.I should be used to this by now but it’s still surreal—how he can talk about the books and also about me, and they have no idea. It’s like when he touched me behind his desk while everyone else sat at the table, working on their thesis statements. Things happen right in front of them. It’s like they’re all too ordinary to notice.Who is to blame? He underlines the question and looks to us for answers. He’s struggling. I see that now. It isn’t that he’s nervous to be around me; he’s wondering whether he did something wrong. If I were braver, I would raise my hand and say about Ethan Frome and about him, He didn’t do anything wrong. Or I’d say, Shouldn’t Mattie share some of the blame, too? But I sit silently, a scared little mouse.At the end of class, Who is to blame? still stretches across the chalkboard. The other students file through the door, down the hallway, and out into the courtyard, but I take my time. I pull my backpack zipper, bend down and pretend to tie my shoes, slow as a sloth. He doesn’t acknowledge me until the hallway outside the classroom is empty. No witnesses.“How are you doing?” he asks.I smile brightly, tug at my backpack straps. “I’m fine.” I know I can’t show even a hint of distress. If I do, he might decide I can’t handle any more kisses.“I was worried you might be feeling overwhelmed,” he says.“I’m not.”“Ok.” He exhales. “Sounds like you’re doing better than I am.”We decide I’ll come by later, after faculty service hour when the humanities building is quiet. When I’m nearly out the door, he says, “You look lovely.”I can’t stop the grin from taking over my face. I do look lovely—dark green sweater, my best-fitting corduroys, my hair falling in waves over my shoulders. That was on purpose.When I return to the classroom, the sun has set, and there aren’t any window blinds so we turn off the lights, sit behind his desk, and kiss in the dark.