Ms. Thompson organizes a Secret Santa in the dorm and I draw Jenny’s name, which seems like it should hurt. Instead all I feel is a vague annoyance. I take the ten dollars I’m meant to use on a gift and go to the grocery store, buy her a pound of generic-brand ground coffee, and spend the rest on snacks for myself. I don’t even wrap the coffee; at the gift exchange I give it to her in the plastic grocery bag.“What is this?” she asks, the first words she’s spoken to me since last spring on the last day of the year—the I guess I’ll see you around she tossed over her shoulder as she left our dorm room.“It’s your gift.”“You didn’t wrap it?” She opens the bag with the tips of her fingers, like she’s worried what might be inside.“It’s coffee,” I say. “Because you were always drinking coffee or whatever.”She looks down at it, blinking so hard that for a moment I’m horrified, thinking she’s about to cry. “Here.” She thrusts an envelope at me. “I got your name, too.”Inside the envelope is a card and, inside that, a twenty-dollar gift certificate to the bookstore downtown. I hold the gift certificate in one hand and the card in the other, my eyes darting back and forth between them. Inside the card, she wrote, Merry Christmas, Vanessa. I know we haven’t kept in touch but I hope we can work on repairing our friendship.“Why did you do this?” I ask. “We were only supposed to spend ten dollars.”Ms. Thompson moves from pair to pair, commenting on all the gifts. When she reaches us, she sees Jenny’s red cheeks, the vacuum-sealed bag of cheap coffee fallen out onto the floor, the guilt all over my face.“Mmm, what a nice gift!” Ms. Thompson says, so enthusiastic I think she’s talking about the gift certificate, but she means the coffee. “As far as I’m concerned, you can never have too much caffeine. Vanessa, what did you get?”I hold up the gift certificate and Ms. Thompson gives a thin smile. “That’s nice, too.”“I have homework to do,” Jenny says. She picks up the coffee with two fingers, like it’s something gross she doesn’t want to touch, and leaves the common room. I want to say more, to shout after her that the only reason she wants anything to do with me is because Tom broke up with her, and that it’s too late because I’ve moved on. I’m doing things now Jenny wouldn’t even be able to imagine.Ms. Thompson turns to me. “I think it was a thoughtful gift, Vanessa. It’s not just about how much money you spend.”I realize then why she’s being nice—she thinks I’m so poor that a three-dollar bag of coffee is all I can afford. The assumption is both funny and insulting, but I don’t correct her.“Ms. Thompson, what are you doing for Christmas?” Deanna asks.“Going home to New Jersey for a while,” she says. “Might take a trip to Vermont with friends.”“What about your boyfriend?” Lucy asks.“Can’t say I have one of those.” Ms. Thompson steps away to check out some other Secret Santa gifts, and I watch how she clasps her hands behind her back and pretends not to hear Deanna whisper to Lucy, “I thought Mr. Strane was her boyfriend?”
One afternoon Strane tells me my name originated with Jonathan Swift, the Irish writer, and that Swift once knew a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, nickname Essa. “He broke her name apart and put it back together as something new,” Strane said. “Van-essa became Vanessa. Became you.”I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.He says the first Vanessa was in love with Swift and that she was twenty-two years younger. He was her tutor. Strane goes to the bookshelves behind his desk and finds a copy of the poem Swift wrote called “Cadenus and Vanessa.” It’s long, sixty pages, the whole thing about a young girl in love with her teacher. My heart gallops as I skim the poem, but I feel his eyes on me so I try not to let it show, shrugging my shoulders and saying in my laziest voice, “That’s kind of funny, I guess.”Strane frowns. “I thought it eerie, not funny.” He slides the book back onto the shelf and mumbles, “It got under my skin. Made me start thinking about fate.”I watch him sit at his desk and flip open his grade book. The tips of his ears are red, like he’s embarrassed. Am I capable of embarrassing him? I forget sometimes he can be vulnerable, too.“I know what you mean,” I say.He looks up from his book, light glinting off his glasses.“I kind of feel like this whole thing is destiny.”“This whole thing,” he repeats. “You mean what we do together?”I nod. “Like maybe this is what I was born to do.”As my words register, his lips start to tremble like he’s trying hard not to smile. “Go shut the door,” he says. “Turn out the lights.”
I use the pay phone in the Gould common room to call home the Sunday before Christmas break, and Mom says she has to pick me up on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, meaning an extra day of break, an extra day of no Strane. It’s hard enough getting through a weekend without him; I don’t know how I’ll manage to survive three weeks, so when she tells me this, it feels like the floor opens up beneath me.“You didn’t even ask me! You can’t just decide that you’re going to pick me up a whole day early without asking me if it’s ok.” My panic gains momentum and I struggle not to cry. “I have responsibilities,” I say. “There are things I have to do.”“What things?” Mom asks. “Good lord, why are you so upset? Where is this coming from?”Pressing my forehead against the wall, I take a breath and manage to get out, “There’s a creative writing club meeting I can’t miss.”“Oh.” Mom exhales like she expected something more serious. “Well, I won’t get there until six. That should give you enough time to go to your meeting.”She takes a bite of something and it crunches between her teeth. I hate how she eats while she talks to me, or cleans, or has conversations with Dad at the same time. Sometimes she’ll take the phone with her into the bathroom and I don’t realize until I hear a flush in the background.“I didn’t know you liked that club so much,” she says.I wipe my nose with my sweatshirt’s dirty cuff. “It’s not about me liking it. It’s about taking my responsibilities seriously.”“Hmm.” She takes another bite, and whatever it is rattles around in her teeth.
On Monday, when Strane and I sit in the dark classroom, I won’t let him kiss me. I turn away and twist my legs out of his reach.“What wrong?” he asks.I shake my head, don’t know how to explain. He seems completely unbothered by the upcoming break. He hasn’t even brought it up.“It’s fine if you don’t want me to touch you,” he says. “Just tell me to stop.”
He leans in close, peering at me, trying to make out my expression in the dark. I can see the darting shine of his eyes because he’s not wearing his glasses—ever since I told him they hurt my face, he takes them off before we kiss.
“As much as I wish I could, I can’t read your mind,” he says.
His fingertips touch my knees and wait to see if I’ll jerk away. When I don’t, his hands creep farther up my thighs, over my hips, and around my waist, the casters of the chair squeaking as he pulls me close. I sigh, lean into him, his body like a mountain.
“It’s just we’re not going to be able to do this again for so long,” I say. “Three whole weeks.”
I feel him relax. “That’s what you’re sulking over?”
It’s how he laughs that makes me start to cry, like I’m being ridiculous, but he thinks it’s the idea of missing him that’s making me so upset.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, kissing my forehead. He calls me sensitive. “Like a . . .” He stops and softly laughs. “I was about to say like a little girl. I forget sometimes that’s exactly what you are.”
I turn my face deeper into him and whisper that I feel out of control. I want him to say he feels the same, but he just continues stroking my hair. Maybe he doesn’t need to say it. I think of his head in my lap the afternoon we first kissed, how he moaned, I’m going to ruin you. Of course he’s out of control; you have to be careening to do what we’re doing.
He pulls away, kisses the corners of my mouth. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
The ground outside is covered in snow, reflecting enough light into the classroom so I can see his smile, the wrinkles that appear around his eyes. Up close, his face is disjointed, enormous. On the bridge of his nose there are indentations from his glasses that never go away.
“But you have to promise not to agree to what I’m proposing unless you absolutely want to,” he says. “Ok?”
I sniff, wipe my eyes. “Ok.”
“What if after Christmas break . . . say, the first Friday we’re back . . .” He draws in a breath. “What if you came to my house?”
I blink in surprise. I assumed this would happen eventually, but this feels soon, though maybe not. We’ve been kissing for over two weeks.
When I say nothing, he continues. “I think it’d be nice to spend time together outside of this classroom. We could eat dinner, look at each other with the lights on. That’d be fun, right?”
Immediately, I’m afraid. I wish I weren’t and, chewing on the inside of my cheek, I do my best to rationalize it away. I’m not afraid of him but rather of his body—the sheer size of it, the expectation that I do things to it. As long as we stay in the classroom, kissing is all we can do, but going to his house means anything can happen. That the obvious will happen. Meaning sex.
“How would I even get there?” I ask. “What about curfew?”
“Slip out of the dorm afterward. I can wait for you in the parking lot out back and whisk you away. Then in the morning, I’d get you back early enough that no one would be the wiser.”
When I still hesitate, his body stiffens. His chair rolls backward, away from me, and cold air sweeps across my legs. “I’m not going to force you if you’re not ready,” he says.
“I’m ready.”
“It doesn’t seem like you are.”
“I am,” I insist. “I’ll come over.”
“But is that what you want?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it really?”
“Yes.”
He stares at me, the shine of his eyes moving back and forth. I gnaw harder on my cheek, thinking maybe he won’t be mad at me if I hurt myself enough to ignite a fresh round of tears.
“Listen,” he says, “I have no expectations. I’d be happy to sit on the couch with you and watch a movie. We don’t even have to hold hands if you don’t want to, ok? It’s important that you never feel coerced. That’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself.”
“I don’t feel coerced.”
“You don’t? Truly?”
I shake my head.
“Good. That’s good.” He reaches for my hands. “You’re in charge here, Vanessa. You decide what we do.”
I wonder if he really believes that. He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.
* * *
For Christmas I get: a fifty-dollar bill; two sweaters, one lavender cable knit, the other white mohair; a new Fiona Apple CD to replace my scratched-up one; boots from the L.L.Bean outlet store, but you can only tell the stitching is messed up if you look closely; an electric kettle for my dorm room; a box of maple sugar candies; socks and underwear; a chocolate orange.
At home with my parents, I do my best to put Strane in a drawer and close it up tight. I resist the urge to stay in bed daydreaming and writing about him and instead do things that make me feel like the girl I used to be—reading by the woodstove; chopping figs and walnuts with Mom at the kitchen table; helping Dad haul home a tree, Babe the puppy bouncing alongside us like a furry yellow dolphin as we trudge through the snow. Most nights after Dad goes to bed and Babe follows him upstairs, Mom and I lie on the couch and watch TV. We like the same shows: period dramas, Ally McBeal, The Daily Show. We laugh along with Jon Stewart, cringe when George W. Bush comes on-screen. The recount is long over now, Bush declared the winner.
“I still can’t believe he stole the election,” I say.
“They all steal elections,” Mom says. “It’s just not so bad when a Democrat does it.”
While we watch TV and eat the expensive ginger lemon cookies Mom keeps hidden at the top of the pantry, she inches her feet toward me and tries to burrow them under my butt even though I hate it. When I grumble, she tells me to stop being prickly. “You used to be in my womb, you know.”
I tell her about the note Jenny gave me with the Secret Santa present, about her and me repairing our friendship, and Mom smirks, jabs her finger at me. “I told you she’d try to do that. I hope you don’t fall for it.”
She falls asleep, her dishwater blond hair tangled across her face as the TV switches to infomercials. This is when Strane comes roaring back, when the house is still and I’m the only one awake. I stare at the screen with glazed eyes and feel him there with me, holding me, slipping his hand under my pajama bottoms. On the other end of the couch, my mother snores, jolting me out of the daydream, and I flee upstairs. My bedroom is the only safe space to let him in, where I can shut the door, lie on my bed, and imagine what it will feel like to be in his house, what it will feel like to have sex. What he’ll look like when he takes off his clothes.
I dig through my old issues of Seventeen, searching for articles about having sex for the first time in case there’s something I should do to prepare myself, but they all say the same inane stuff like, “Having sex is a big deal, don’t feel pressured to do it, you have all the time in the world!” So I go online and find a message board thread titled “Advice on Losing Your V-Card,” and the only piece of advice for girls is “Don’t just lie there,” but what does that even mean? Get on top? I try to imagine myself doing that to Strane, but it’s too embarrassing; my whole body cringes at the thought. I close the browser, first checking the search history three times to make sure I deleted everything.
The night before we drive back to Browick, while my parents watch Tom Brokaw, I sneak into their room and open the top drawer of my mother’s dresser, root around the bras and underwear until I find a silky black nightie with a yellowed tag still attached. Back in my bedroom, I try it on without anything underneath. It’s a little long, reaching past my knees, but it’s tight, the outline of my body visible in a way that seems grown-up and sexy. Staring in the mirror, I pile my hair on top of my head and let it fall around my face. I bite my bottom lip until it turns swollen and red. One of the straps falls down my arm and I imagine Strane, with his tender-condescending smile, slipping it back up my shoulder. In the morning, I stuff the nightgown into the bottom of my bag and can’t stop smiling the whole drive back to Browick, pleased with how easy it is to get away with something, with anything.
On campus the snowbanks are taller, the Christmas decorations gone, and the dorms stink of the vinegar they use to wash the hardwood floors. Early Monday morning I go to the humanities building in search of Strane. At the sight of me, his face lights up, breaks into a grin, a hungry mouth. He locks the classroom door and presses me against the filing cabinet, kisses me so hard he practically gnaws at me, our teeth knocking against each other. His thigh pushes my legs apart and rubs against me—it feels good, but it happens so quickly I gasp, and at the sound he lets go and staggers backward, asks if he hurt me.
“I can’t keep it together when I’m around you,” he says. “I’m acting like a teenager.”
He asks if we’re still on for Friday. Says that over these past weeks, he thought about me constantly, was surprised at how much he missed me. At that, I narrow my eyes. Why surprised? “Because really we don’t know each other that well,” he explains. “But, my god, you’ve gotten to me.” When I ask him what he did for Christmas, he says, “Thought about you.”
The week feels like a countdown, like slow footsteps down a long hallway. Once Friday night arrives, it hardly feels real to shove the black nightgown into my backpack while across the hall Mary Emmett belts out that five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred-minutes song from Rent with her door wide open and Jenny strides by in her bathrobe on her way to the shower. Strange to think that for them it’s just another Friday night, how easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.
At nine thirty I check in with Ms. Thompson, tell her I don’t feel well and that I’m going to bed early, then wait until the hallway is clear and sneak out the back stairwell, the one with the broken alarm. Hurrying across campus, I see Strane’s station wagon waiting with the headlights off in the lot behind the humanities building. When I throw open the passenger door and slide inside, he pulls me close, laughing in a way I haven’t heard from him before—manic and gasping, as though he can’t believe this is really happening.
His house is sparse and cleaner than I’ve ever seen my parents’, the kitchen sink empty and shining, a dishrag drying on the faucet’s long neck. A few days ago he asked what I like to eat, said he wanted to have my favorites on hand, and he shows me the three pints of expensive ice cream in the freezer, a six-pack of Cherry Coke in the fridge, two big bags of potato chips on the counter. There’s a bottle of whiskey on the counter, too, along with a glass holding a mostly melted ice cube.
In the living room, there’s no clutter on the coffee table, only a stack of coasters and two remote controls. The bookcases are neatly arranged, nothing thrown in sideways or upside down. As he leads me on a tour, I sip a soda and try to appear impressed but not too impressed, interested but not too interested. Really, though, I’m trembling all over.
His bedroom is the last room he shows me. We stand in the doorway, bubbles pinging inside my soda can, neither of us sure of the next move. I have to be back at Gould in six hours, but I’ve been here for only ten minutes. His bed stretches out before us, neatly made with a khaki comforter and pillows in tartan cases. It feels too soon.
“Are you tired?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking this.” He takes the soda from my hands. “All that caffeine.”
I suggest watching TV, hoping to remind him of the offer he’d made of sitting on the couch and watching a movie, holding hands.
“I’m sure to fall asleep if we do that,” he says. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get ready for bed?”
Turning to his dresser, he opens the top drawer, pulls something out. It’s a pajama set, shorts and a tank top made from white cotton dotted with red strawberries. They’re neatly folded with the tags still attached, brand new, bought especially for me.