He smiles, reaches for my plate and picks up a piece of egg with his fingers, tosses it in his mouth. “Trust me,” he says, “they definitely know that.”
He surprises me with a movie for us to watch—Lolita, the old Kubrick one. It feels like his way of apologizing for saying I take the novel too literally. While we watch, he lets me drink a beer, and after, when we go to bed and I wear the strawberry pajamas again, I’m so floaty that when he asks me to get on my hands and knees so he can go down on me from behind, I don’t act embarrassed at all, I just do it. After the sex is finished, he goes into the living room and brings back the Polaroid camera.
“Don’t get dressed yet,” he says.
I hold my arms over my chest and shake my head, my eyes wide.
Smiling gently, he reassures me it’ll be for his eyes only. “I want to remember this moment,” he says. “The way you look right now.”
He takes the pictures. Afterward, I wrap myself in the comforter and Strane lays the photos across the mattress. Together we watch them develop, the bed and my body emerging from the dark. “My god, look at you,” Strane says, his eyes darting from one to the other. He’s entranced, transfixed.
I stare at the photos and try to see what he sees, but I look too weird in them—painfully pale against the unmade bed, my eyes unfocused, hair matted from sex. When he asks what I think, I say, “They remind me of that Fiona Apple music video.”
He doesn’t look up from the Polaroids. “Fiona who?”
“Apple. My favorite singer? Remember I had you listen to her once?” I also, a couple weeks ago, wrote some of her lyrics on a piece of notebook paper, folded it up, and left it on his desk on my way out of class. We were in the midst of a fight about me going away to college—I said I didn’t want to, he said I shouldn’t let myself be sidetracked, not by anyone or anything, including him, which made me cry, and then he said I was trying to manipulate him by crying. I thought the lyrics might help him understand how I felt, but he never said anything about it. I wonder if he even read them.
“Right, right.” He gathers up all the photos. “Better put these in a safe hiding place.”
He leaves the bedroom, goes downstairs, and I’m suddenly so annoyed I feel a burning in my chest, in my face and limbs. I pull the comforter over my head, breathe in the hot air, and remember how I said something about Britney Spears a few weeks ago and he had no idea who she was. “Is she some kind of pop act?” he asked. “I didn’t realize your taste skewed that way.” He made it seem like I was stupid when he’s the one who didn’t even know who Britney Spears was.
Over April break, I turn sixteen. Babe goes to the vet to get spayed and comes home dopey with a shaved, stitched-up belly. I show my parents the list of colleges Strane picked out for me and we drive down to southern Maine to visit a couple there. As we wander the campuses, my father stares dumbfounded at the buildings, while my mother reads off information she found online: 40 percent of Bowdoin students participate in study abroad; one in four students continue on to graduate school. “What’s the price tag for this place?” Dad asks. “Did you print off those figures?”
Halfway through the week, Strane comes to see me while my parents are at work, parking the station wagon in an overgrown boat access lane and hiking through the woods to our house. I wait in the living room, peeking around the doorway into the kitchen, waiting for him to appear in the window, and I let out a little shriek when he does, as though I’m scared, but I’m not really—how could I be? In his khaki jacket and clip-on sunglasses, he looks like someone’s dad, some nondescript middle-aged dork, mild as milk.
As he cups his hands and peers in through the window, I grab Babe by the collar and throw open the door. Once he steps inside, she slips out of my hands. He grimaces as Babe jumps on him, her pink tongue flopping out the side of her mouth. I tell him to say no and she’ll stop, but instead he shoves her too hard and she falls onto her back, the whites of her eyes flashing as she sulks away from him into her kennel. For a moment, I hate him.
He looks around the house, hands clasped behind his back like he’s scared to touch anything, and I suddenly see everything from his perspective, how the house isn’t clean like his, the layer of dog hair on the carpet, the old couch and its sagging cushions. Walking through the downstairs, he pauses at the little wooden houses balanced on the windowsills. Mom collects them; I give her one for Christmas every year. Strane stares at them and I imagine what he’s thinking—that they’re an ugly, stupid thing to collect. I think of the knickknacks on his bookcases, each one from a foreign country with a story behind it, and I think of what he said about my parents after their conference. Decent people, he called them. Salt-of-the-earth types. It reminds me of something I heard him say about another scholarship student, a senior in his AP class who was accepted to Wellesley but wasn’t going because it was too expensive. He felt awful for her, but what could you do? The poor girl doesn’t come from much, he said.
“It’s boring down here,” I say, grabbing his hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”
In my bedroom, he ducks as he steps through the doorway. He’s so big he dominates the whole room, his head brushing against the slanted ceiling, his eyes taking in the poster-covered walls, the unmade bed.
“Oh,” he breathes. “This is such a precious thing.”
Because of Browick, my room is frozen in time, more a representation of who I was at thirteen than who I am now. I worry it might seem too much like a little girl’s room, but that doesn’t seem to bother Strane. He studies the bookcase crammed full of middle-grade novels I’ve long outgrown, the dresser cluttered with dried-out bottles of nail polish, Beanie Babies covered in dust. Lifting the lid of my jewelry box, he grins when the ballerina pops up and begins to spin. He opens a drawstring bag and pours worry dolls made of brown paper and string into his palm. He treats everything so delicately.
Before we have sex, he has me pretend to be asleep so he can crawl into bed and touch me as I feign waking up. When he pushes inside me, he clamps a hand over my mouth and says, “We have to be quiet,” as though there were someone else in the house. While he pounds into me, so frantic and fast it feels like my brain rattles around in my skull, my limbs go limp and my mind slips out of me, retreats downstairs where Babe whines in her kennel, still wondering what she did wrong. After Strane finishes, he takes another Polaroid of me lying in bed, posing me first, arranging my hair over my breasts and opening the window shade so the light drapes across my body.
Later we go for a drive in his station wagon and cruise the highways that wind through the down east woods. His window is open; he lets his arm hang out. It’s warm for April, seventy degrees, buds on the trees, weeds starting to grow along the roadside.
“I’ll come see you during the summer just like this,” he says. “I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for drives.”
“Like Lolita and Humbert,” I say without thinking, and then wince as I wait for his annoyance at the comparison, but he only smiles.
“I suppose that’s fair.” He looks over at me, slides his hand up my thigh. “You like the idea of that, don’t you? Maybe one day I’ll just keep driving rather than bring you home. I’ll steal you away.”