My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
you did. How else would I know?” My voice sounds harsh, angry, and I can tell he’s a little taken aback. Mostly, though, he looks amused, like he thinks my frustration is cute. “I might’ve gone there,” I add. “You know, to scope it out.”
“I see.”
“Are you mad?”
“Not at all. I’m flattered.”
“I saw you unloading groceries from your car.”
“You did? When?”
“Yesterday.”
“You were watching me.”
I nod.
“You should have made yourself known and said hello.”
My eyes narrow. That isn’t what I expected him to say. “What if someone saw me?”
He smiles, cocks his head. “Why would it matter if someone saw you saying hello to me?”
I clench my jaw and breathe hard through my nose. His innocence feels put on, like he’s playing with me by playing dumb.
Still smiling, he leans back in his chair, and him doing that—leaning back, crossing his arms, looking me up and down as though I’m entertaining, just something to look at—makes anger flare up inside me, so sudden and strong I ball my hands into fists to stop from screaming, lunging forward, grabbing the Harvard mug off his desk and hurling it at his face.
I turn on my heel, stomp out of the room and down the hallway. I’m furious the whole way back to Gould, but once I’m in my room, the anger disappears and all that’s left is the dull-ache desire for meaning I’ve had for weeks now. He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.
My midsemester geometry grade is a D-plus. All eyes turn on me when Mrs. Antonova announces this during our monthly advisee meeting at the Italian restaurant. At first I don’t realize she’s talking to me; my mind drifts as I methodically tear apart a piece of bread and roll it back into dough between my fingers.
“Vanessa,” she says, rapping her knuckles against the table. “D-plus.”
I look up and notice the stares, Mrs. Antonova holding a piece of paper, her own faculty feedback. “Then I guess there’s nowhere for me to go but up,” I say.
Mrs. Antonova stares at me over the top of her glasses. “You could still go down,” she says. “You could fail.”
“I won’t fail.”
“You need a plan of action, a tutor. We’ll get you one.”
I glower down at the table as she moves on to the next advisee, my stomach tight at the thought of a tutor, because tutor sessions meet during faculty service hour, which would mean less time with Mr. Strane. Kyle Guinn flashes me a sympathetic smile after he’s given similar news about his Spanish grade, and I sink so low in my chair my chin practically rests on the table.
When I get back to campus, the Gould common room is crowded, the TV playing election results. I squeeze onto one of the couches and watch the states get sorted into two columns as the polls close. “Vermont for Gore,” the news anchor says. “Kentucky for Bush.” At one point, when Ralph Nader flashes on-screen, Deanna and Lucy start to clap, and when Bush comes on, everybody boos. It looks like a sure thing for Gore until right before ten, when they announce they’re putting Florida back in the “too close to call” column, and I get so fed up with the entire thing I give up and go to bed.
At first everyone jokes about the election never ending, but it stops being funny when the Florida recount goes into full swing. Mr. Sheldon spends most days with his feet propped up on his desk, but now he springs to life, drawing sprawling webs on the chalkboard meant to illustrate the many ways democracy can fail. During one class he lectures us on all the different kinds of chads—hanging, fat, pregnant—while we try not to laugh and shoot looks at Chad Gagnon.
Meanwhile in American lit, we read A River Runs Through It and Mr. Strane tells us his own stories of growing up in Montana—ranches and real-life cowboys, dogs eaten by grizzlies, mountains so big they block out the sun. I try to imagine him as a boy, but I can’t even picture what he’d look like without a beard. After A River Runs Through It, we start on Robert Frost and Mr. Strane recites “The Road Not Taken” from memory. He says we shouldn’t feel uplifted by the poem, that Frost’s message is widely misunderstood. The poem isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice. He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.
“We’re born, we live, we die,” he says, “and the choices we make in the middle, all those things we agonize over day after day, none of those matter in the end.”
No one says anything to counter his argument, not even Hannah Levesque, who is super Catholic and presumably believes that the choices we make actually matter quite a bit in the end. She only stares at him with her lips slightly parted, dumbstruck.
Mr. Strane passes out copies of another Frost poem, “Putting in the Seed,” and tells us to read this one silently to ourselves, and after we finish doing that, he tells us to do it again. “But this time, as you read it,” he says, “I want you to think about sex.”
It takes a second to sink in, for furrowed brows to give way to flushed cheeks, but once it does Mr. Strane surveys the palpable embarrassment with a smile.
Only I’m not embarrassed. The mention of sex smacks me across the face and makes my body run hot. Maybe this is about me. Maybe this is his next move.
“Are you saying this poem is about sex?” Jenny asks.
“I’m saying that it deserves to be read closely and with an open mind,” Mr. Strane says. “And let’s be honest here, I’m not asking any of you to think about something you don’t already spend a significant amount of time contemplating. Now get to it.” He claps his hands to signal we should start.
On the second read through the poem, with sex at the forefront of my mind, I do notice things I didn’t before: the details of white soft petals, smooth bean and wrinkled pea, the final image of an arched body. Even the phrase “putting in the seed” is obviously suggestive.
“What do you think of it now?” Mr. Strane stands with his back to the chalkboard, one foot crossed over the other. We say nothing, but our silence only proves him right, that the poem is about sex after all.
He waits and his eyes travel the room, seem to look at every student except for me. Tom takes a breath, about to speak, but the bell rings and Mr. Strane shakes his head at us as though disappointed.
“You’re all puritans,” he says, waving his hand in dismissal.
As we leave the classroom and start down the hallway, Tom says, “What the hell was that?” and with a brisk authority that makes me seethe, Jenny says, “He’s a huge misogynist. My sister warned me.”
Later, Jesse doesn’t show at creative writing club and the classroom feels enormous with just me and Mr. Strane. I sit at the seminar table and he behind his desk, each of us staring at the other across a vast continent.
“There isn’t much for you to do today,” he says. “The lit journal is in good shape. We can start copyediting when Jesse’s here to help.”
“Should I go?”
“Not if you want to stay.”
Of course I want to stay. I take my notebook from my backpack and open it to the poem I drafted the night before.
“What