My Dark Vanessa. Kate Russell Elizabeth
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.
She waves the boats in from the sea.
One by one, they slide onto the sand-shore
with a thump that echoes
through her marrowed-out bones.
She shivers & shakes
as the sailors take her,
then cries through the aftercare,
the sailors feeding her mouthfuls of salted kelp,
saying they are sorry,
so sorry for what they’ve done.
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