I stand for a while in the middle of the kitchen, my ears following the groan of the stairs as she climbs, my parents’ bedroom door opening and closing, her footsteps directly above me, the creak of the metal frame as she gets into bed. The walls and floors here are so thin, the house so cheaply built, you can hear anything if you listen hard enough, a constant threat of exposure.
I plunge my hand into the sink and grope blindly for pieces of the broken plate, not caring if I slice myself open. I leave the shards lined up on the counter, dripping water and soap suds. Later, when I’m lying in my own bed still checking myself for hurt—was it so bad, what she said to me? it feels worse than what I deserved—she tosses the shards into the trash and I hear the clatter of ceramic from all the way up in my attic bedroom. The next day I find Lolita back on my bookshelf.
Charley’s mom gets a job in New Hampshire, the third time they’ve moved in four years. On her last day at school, she sneaks beers in her backpack and we drink them behind the grocery store, our burps echoing against the dumpsters. After school, Charley gives me a ride home, still buzzed, running every red light on our way out of town while I laugh and lean my head against the window, thinking, If this is how I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I say as she turns onto the lake road. “I won’t have any friends without you.”
“There’s Jade,” she says, peering at the dark road, trying to avoid the potholes.
“Ugh, no thanks. She’s the fuckin’ worst.” My bluntness surprises me; I’ve never shit-talked Jade to Charley before, but what does it matter now?
Charley smirks. “Yeah, she can be. And she does kind of hate you.” She stops the car at the top of my driveway. “I’d come in, but I don’t want your parents to smell beer on me. Though you probably smell like it, too.”
“Wait a sec.” I dig through my backpack for the toothpaste I began carrying around once I started smoking cigarettes. I suck a little bit into my mouth, swish it around.
“Look at you.” Charley laughs. “Surprisingly screwed up and brilliant.”
I hug her for a long time and, in my giddiness, want to kiss her but control the urge, force myself to climb out of the car. Before I shut the door, I duck down and say, “Hey, thanks for not letting me leave with that guy at the bowling alley.”
She frowns, trying to remember. Her eyebrows lift. “Oh, right! No problem. He was clearly going to murder you.”
As she backs out of the driveway, she rolls down the window and calls, “Keep in touch!” I nod and call back, “I will!” but it means nothing. I don’t have her address or new phone number. Even later, with Facebook and Twitter, I’ll never be able to find her.
For a while, Jade and I try to hang out, trudging alongside each other to the grocery store during lunch, trying to convince the other to shoplift and growing incensed when she won’t. One morning, I’m in the cafeteria before first period, scrambling to finish my algebra homework, when she marches up to me.
“So I saw that guy Craig at the bowling alley on Saturday,” she says.
I look up. She’s smiling, can barely keep her lips closed. She looks like she’s about to spill out all over the place.
“He said to tell you that you’re a cunt.” She waits, eyes wide, for my reaction. I feel my face burn and I imagine hurling my algebra book at her, knocking her over, yanking on her brassy bleached hair.
But I just roll my eyes and mumble something about him being a gun-loving pedophile, then turn back to my homework. After that, Jade starts hanging out with a popular group, the kids she was friends with in middle school. She dyes her hair brown and joins the tennis team. When we pass in the hallway, she stares straight ahead.
Rather than deal with finding a new place to sit in the cafeteria, I give up altogether and start spending lunch period at the diner in the strip mall. Every day I order coffee and pie while I read or finish homework, imagining that I look mysterious and adult sitting in a booth all by myself. Sometimes I feel men looking at me from their counter stools, and sometimes I meet their gaze, but it always ends there.
* * *
At home, deep in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, the internet is my only way out. Online, I search endlessly, googling different combinations of Strane’s name and Browick, in quotations and without, but find only his faculty profile and something about him volunteering at a community literacy program in 1995. Then, in mid-March, a new result appears: he won a national teaching award, attended a ceremony in New York. There’s a photo of him onstage accepting the plaque, a big grin on his face, white teeth shining through black beard. I don’t recognize his shoes and his hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen it. Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.
At night, I stay up late talking with strangers on Instant Messenger. I search the same list of key words—lolita, nabokov, teacher—and I message all the men who show up in the results. If they start getting creepy like Craig, I sign off. It’s not about that. I just like how they happily listen while I tell them everything that happened with Strane. You’re a very special girl, they type, for being able to appreciate the love of a man like that. If the men ask for a photo of me, I send an image of Kirsten Dunst from the movie The Virgin Suicides and none of them ever call me out on it, which makes me wonder if these men are stupid or just ok with me being a liar. If they send me a photo, I tell them they’re handsome and they all believe me, even the ones who are clearly ugly. I save all their pictures in a folder titled MATH HOMEWORK so my parents won’t look in it, and sometimes I sit clicking through photo after photo, sad homely face after sad homely face, and think that if Strane had sent me a photo before I really knew him, he’d fit right in.
Mud season turns to blackfly season. The lake ice thaws slowly, first turning gray, then blue, and then dissolving to cold water. The snow in the yard melts, but deep in the woods, drifts still nestle against boulders, crusty snow piles peppered with pine needles and spruce cones. In April, a week before my seventeenth birthday, Mom asks if I want to have a party.
“And invite who?”
“Your friends,” she says.
“What friends?”
“You have friends.”
“That’s news to me.”
“You do,” she insists.
It almost makes me feel sorry for her, picturing what she imagines my life at school is like, smiling faces in the hallways, a lunch table of nice girls with good grades, when in reality it’s me staring at the ground as I walk and drinking black coffee in a diner with a bunch of retirees.
We end up going out to eat at Olive Garden for my birthday, a brick of lasagna followed by a brick of tiramisu pierced with a candle. My present is an eight-week driver’s education course, a gesture that shows Browick is even further behind us.
“And maybe, once you pass,” Dad says, “we’ll find you a car.”
Mom’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Eventually,” he clarifies.
I thank them and try not to act too excited by the thought of the places a car can take me.