My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth

       2000

      One Friday night per month, a dance is held in the dining hall. With the tables cleared away and the lights dimmed, it’s a scene that could be set in any other high school. There’s the hired DJ, a cluster of people dancing in the middle of the floor, and the shy kids huddled around the perimeter, divided by gender. Some teachers are there, too. As chaperones, they mill about, maintaining their distance, paying less attention to us than to each other.

      This is the Halloween dance, so people are wearing costumes and two giant buckets of candy sit by the double doors. Most costumes are lazy—boys in jeans and white T-shirts calling themselves James Dean, girls in pleated miniskirts and pigtails calling themselves Britney Spears—but a few have gone to elaborate lengths with supplies bought downtown. One girl moves through the dining hall as a dragon with spiny wings and a train of blue-green scales, trailed by her boyfriend, a knight in cardboard armor stinking of spray paint. A boy in a suit waves a fake cigar in girls’ faces, laughing behind a rubber Bill Clinton mask. Meanwhile, I’m a half-hearted cat, black dress and black tights, drawn-on whiskers and cardboard ears thrown together in ten minutes. I came only to see Mr. Strane. He’s working as a chaperone.

      Usually, I never go to the dances. Everything about them makes me cringe—the bad music, the embarrassing DJ with his goatee and frosted tips, the kids pretending not to stare at the couples grinding against each other. I’m forcing myself to suffer through this one because it’s been a week. A whole week since Mr. Strane touched me, since he put his hand on my leg and told me he could tell we were similar, two people who like dark things. Since then? Nothing. When I spoke in class, his eyes darted to the table like he couldn’t bear to look at me. During creative writing club he gathered his things and left Jesse and me alone (“Department meeting,” he explained, but if it was a department meeting, why did he need his coat and everything in his briefcase?), and later when I sought him out during faculty service hour, his door was closed, the classroom dark behind textured glass.

      So I’m impatient, maybe even desperate. I want something to happen and that seems more likely at an event like this where boundaries are temporarily blurred, students and teachers thrust together in a dimly lit room. I don’t really care what the something else might be—another touch, a compliment. It doesn’t matter so long as it tells me what he wants, what this is, if it’s anything at all.

      I eat a fun-size candy bar in tiny bites and watch the couples dance to a slow song, swaying around the floor like bottles in a pool of water. At one point, Jenny strides across the room wearing a satin dress that vaguely resembles a kimono, chopsticks shoved through her nubby ponytail. For a moment she seems to be headed straight for me and I freeze, chocolate melting on my tongue, but then Tom emerges from behind her wearing his normal clothes, jeans and a Beck T-shirt, not even attempting a costume. He touches her shoulder; Jenny jerks away. The music is too loud to eavesdrop, but it’s obvious they’re fighting and that it’s bad. Jenny’s chin wobbles, her eyes screw shut. When Tom touches his fingers to her arm, she plants a hand flat on his chest and shoves him so strongly he stumbles backward. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen them fight.

      I’m so fixated that I almost don’t notice Mr. Strane duck out the double doors. I almost let him get away.

      When I step outside, the night is pitch black, no moon and close to freezing. The sounds from the dance muffle to a heartbeat bass line and faraway vocals as the door clicks shut behind me. I look around; my arms break into goose bumps as my eyes search for him but find only the shadows of trees, the empty campus green. I’m about to admit defeat and go back inside when a figure steps out from under the shadow cast by a spruce tree: Mr. Strane in a down vest, a flannel shirt, and jeans, an unlit cigarette between his fingers.

      I don’t move, unsure what to do. I sense he’s embarrassed to be seen with the cigarette and my mind takes over—I imagine him smoking in secret, like how my dad does in the evenings down by the lakeshore; I imagine he wants to quit and sees his inability to do so as a weakness. He’s ashamed of it.

      But even if he’s ashamed, I think, he could have stayed hidden. He could have let me leave.

      He twirls the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “You caught me.”

      “I thought you were leaving,” I say. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

      He pulls a lighter from his pocket and turns it over in his palm a few times. His eyes stay on me. With a sudden clarity, I think, Something’s going to happen, and as the certainty of this settles over me, my heart slows, my shoulders drop.

      He lights the cigarette and gestures for me to follow him back under the tree. It’s enormous, probably the biggest on campus, its lowest limbs still far above our heads. At first, it’s so dark all I can see is the red ember from the cigarette as it moves up to his mouth. My eyes adjust and he appears, as do the boughs overhead, the orange-dead needle carpet beneath our feet.

      “Don’t smoke,” Mr. Strane says. “It’s a nasty habit.” He exhales and the cigarette smell fills my head. We’re standing about five feet apart. It feels so dangerous it’s strange to think we’ve been closer plenty of times before.

      “But it must feel good,” I say. “Otherwise why do it?”

      He laughs, takes another drag. “I guess you’re right.” Looking me over, he notices my costume for the first time. “Well, look at you. Little pussy cat.”

      I laugh from the shock of hearing him say that word, even if he isn’t using it in the sex way. But he doesn’t laugh. He only stares at me, the cigarette smoking in his hand.

      “You know what I’d like to do right now?” he asks. His words flow together more than usual and he sways as he points the cigarette at me. “I’d like to find you a big bed, tuck you in, and kiss you good night.”

      For a second, my brain short-circuits entirely and I’m as good as dead. Moments of nothing pass, a static screen, a wall of noise. Then I come roaring back to life with a harsh, choked sound—not quite a laugh, not quite a cry.

      A door opens from inside the dining hall and music spills out from the dance. Over that, a woman’s voice calls, “Jake?”

      The moment sputters. Mr. Strane turns and hurries toward the voice, throwing down his cigarette without stamping it out. I watch the smoke rise