I set down Pale Fire so she can see the cover. “It’s not homework. Or, I guess it kind of is. It’s for Mr. Strane.”She gives me a smile, irritatingly benign. “You have Mr. Strane for English?”“Yup.” I look up through my eyelashes. “He’s never talked to you about me?”The wrinkles in her forehead deepen. The look lasts only for a second. If I wasn’t on high alert, I wouldn’t even notice it. “Can’t say that he has,” she says.“That’s surprising,” I say. “He and I are pretty close.”I watch the suspicion bloom on her face, a sense of something amiss.

The next afternoon while Strane is at a faculty meeting, I sit behind his desk, something I would never dare to do otherwise. The door is closed, no witnesses to see me thumb through his piles of ungraded assignments and lesson plans and pull open the long, skinny desk drawer that has the weird stuff in it: an opened bag of gumdrops, a pendant of St. Christopher on a broken chain, a bottle of antidiarrhea medicine that I shove to the back in disgust.There usually isn’t anything interesting on his computer, only a file of class documents and his rarely used school email, but when I interrupt the screensaver, an alert pops up on the task bar: (1) New Message from melissa.thompson@browick.edu. I click it open. The email is responding to another, three total in the chain.

I click out of the email chain, marking the most recent one from Ms. Thompson as unread. The curtness of his response makes me laugh out loud, as does Ms. Thompson’s nervousness, her little smiley faces, the dot-dot-dots stringing together incomplete sentences. It occurs to me that maybe she isn’t a smart person, or at least not as smart as me. I’ve never thought that about a teacher before.Strane returns from the faculty meeting in a bad mood, drops his yellow legal pad on his desk and lets out a half sigh, half groan. “This place is going to hell,” he mutters. Squinting at the computer monitor, he asks, “Did you touch this?” I shake my head. “Hmm.” He grabs the mouse, clicks around. “Might need to put a password on this thing.”At the end of faculty service hour, when he’s packing his briefcase, I say in a tone so painfully blasé it doesn’t even sound like me, “You know Ms. Thompson is my dorm parent, right?”I busy myself with putting on my coat so I don’t have to look at him while he chooses his answer.“I do know that,” he says.I drag my zipper up to my throat. “So, you and her are friends?”“Sure.”“Because I remember seeing you together at the Halloween dance.” I peek over at him, watch him wipe his glasses on his tie, put them back on.“So you did read my email,” he says. When I don’t say anything, he crosses his arms and gives me one of his teacher looks. Cut the bullshit.“Were you more than friends?” I ask.“Vanessa.”“I’m just asking a question.”“You are,” he agrees, “but it’s a loaded question.”I pull my zipper up and down a few times. “I don’t really care either way. It would just be nice to know.”“And why is that?”“Because what if she senses there’s something going on with you and me? She might get jealous and—”“And what?”“I don’t know. Retaliate?”“That’s ridiculous.”“She wrote those emails.”Strane leans back in his chair. “I think the best solution to this problem is for you not to read my email.”I roll my eyes. He’s being evasive, which means the truth isn’t what I want to hear, and probably means he and Ms. Thompson were more than friends. They probably had sex.I throw my backpack over one shoulder. “You know, I’ve seen her without makeup. She’s not that pretty. Also, she’s kind of fat.”“Come on,” he chides, “that’s not nice.”I glower at him. Of course it isn’t nice; that’s the whole point. “I’m leaving now. I guess I’ll see you in a week.”Before I open the classroom door, he says, “You shouldn’t be jealous.”“I’m not jealous.”“You are.”“I’m not.”He stands, moves around his desk and across the classroom toward me. He reaches over my shoulder and flips off the lights, takes my face in his hands, kisses my forehead. “Ok,” he says softly. “Ok, you’re not jealous.”I let him pull me in, my cheek resting against the middle of his chest. His heart echoes in my ear.“I’m not envious of whatever dalliances you might’ve had before me,” he says.Dalliances. I mouth the word, wonder if it means what I hope it does—that even if he did do things with Ms. Thompson, he isn’t doing them anymore, and whatever he did with her was never serious, not like what he’s doing with me.“I can’t help what I did before I met you,” he says, “and neither can you.”For me, there’s nothing before him, nothing at all, but I know that’s not the point. This is about him needing something from me. Not quite forgiveness, more like absolution, or maybe apathy. He needs me not to care about the things he’s done.“Ok,” I say. “I won’t be jealous anymore.” It feels so generous, like I’m making a sacrifice for him. I’ve never felt so adult.

* * *

Last summer when I was at the height of my sulking, Mom tried to give me a pep talk about boys. She didn’t understand what had actually happened with Jenny. She thought it had all been about Tom, that I’d liked him, that he’d chosen Jenny over me or something equally clichéd. It takes time for boys to see anything beyond what’s right in front of them, she’d said, and then launched into some allegory about apples falling from trees and boys going for the easy-to-pick apples first but eventually learning that the best apples take a little more work. I wanted none of it.“So you’re saying girls are fruit that only exist for boys to eat?” I asked. “Sounds sexist.”“No,” she says, “that’s not what I’m saying at all.”“You’re literally calling me a bad apple.”“I’m not,” she says. “The other girls are bad apples.”“Why do any girls have to be bad apples? Why do we have to be apples at all?”Mom took a deep breath, pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “My god, you’re difficult,” she says. “All I’m saying is it takes longer for boys to mature. I just don’t want you to feel frustrated.”She meant to be reassuring, but her logic was easy to follow: boys never paid attention to me, therefore I wasn’t pretty, and if I wasn’t pretty, I’d have to wait a long time before anyone noticed me, because boys had to mature before they cared about anything else. In the meantime, apparently my only option was to wait. Like girls sitting in the bleachers at basketball games watching the boys play, or girls sitting on the couch watching boys play video games. Endless waiting.It’s funny to think how wrong Mom was about all that. Because there’s another option for those brave enough to take it: bypass boys altogether, go straight to men. Men who will never make you wait; men who are starved and grateful for scraps of attention, who fall in love so hard they throw themselves at your feet.When I’m home over February break, I go to the grocery store with Mom and, as an experiment, stare at every single man, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones. Who knows how long it’s been since a girl last looked at them this way. I feel sorry for them, how desperate they must be, how lonely and sad. When the men notice me looking, they’re visibly confused, brows knit as they try to figure me out. Only a few recognize what I am, a hardness taking over their faces as they match my stare.

Strane says he can’t go a week without hearing from me. So one night halfway through break, after my parents go to bed, I bring the cordless phone up to my room, stuff pillows along the bottom of my bedroom door to block out the sound. My stomach flips as I dial his number. When he answers with a groggy hello, I say nothing, suddenly mortified at the thought of him rolling over and answering the phone like an old person who goes to bed at ten.“Hello?” he says, impatience raising his voice. “Hello?”I relent. “It’s me.”He sighs and says my name, the s whistling through his teeth. He misses me. He wants me to tell him how my break has been, wants to know everything. I do my best to describe my days—walks with Babe, shopping trips into town, ice-skating as the afternoon sun sets on the frozen lake—while avoiding any mention of my parents, making it sound as though I do everything alone.“What are you doing now?” he asks.“I’m in my room.” I wait for him to ask another question, but he’s quiet. I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep. “What are you doing?”“Thinking.”“About what?”“About you,” he says. “And the time you were here in this bed. Do you remember how that felt?”I say yes, though I know that what I felt and what he felt are probably two different things. If I shut my eyes, I feel the flannel sheets, the weight of the down duvet. His hand wrapped around my wrist, guiding it down.“What are you wearing?” he asks.My eyes dart to the door and I hold my breath, listening for any sounds from my parents’ bedroom. “Pajamas.”“Like the ones I bought you?”I say no, laugh at the thought of wearing something like those in front of my parents.“Tell me what they’re like,” he says.I look down at the pattern of dog faces, fire hydrants, and bones. “They’re stupid,” I say. “You wouldn’t like them.”“Take them off,” he says.“It’s too cold.” I keep my voice light, feign naïveté, but I know what he wants me to do.“Take them off.”He waits; I don’t move. When he asks, “Did you?” I lie and say yes.It goes on from there, him telling me what to do and me not doing any of it but letting him believe I am. I stay indifferent, a little annoyed, until he starts saying, “You’re a baby, a little girl.” Then something in me shifts. I don’t touch myself, but I close my eyes and let my stomach flutter while I think about what he’s doing and that he’s thinking about me while he does it.“Will you do something for me?” he asks. “I want you to say something. Just a few words. Will you do that? Will you say a few words for me?”I open my eyes. “Ok.”“Ok? Ok. Ok.” There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone.“Go on,” he says. “I love you, Daddy.”I say nothing, eyes fixed on my bedroom door.“Just once.” His voice haggard and rough.I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain.I’m far away. I’m airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail. Now I fly out of the house, into the night, through the pines and across the frozen lake where the water moves and moans beneath the ice. He asks me to again say the words. I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans.His labored breathing stops and I land back in my bedroom. He’s finished; it’s over. I try to imagine how it works when he does that, if he comes into his hand, or a towel, or straight onto the sheets. How gross it is for men, having the giveaway of a mess at the end. The thought You’re fucking disgusting surges through me.Strane clears his throat. “Well, I better let you go,” he says.After he hangs up, I throw the phone and it breaks open, batteries rolling across the floor. I lie in bed for a long time, awake but unmoving, eyes fixed on the blue shadows, my mind full of nothing, glassy and still enough to skate on.