Is he here? I shake my head but don’t explain why and Bridget doesn’t ask.
We move in the rest of her stuff, black garbage bags full of clothes and pillows and bedsheets, a trash can stuffed with shoes, a crockpot full of DVDs. We pick up the couch—literally pick it up—and carry it four blocks while cars pass by and honk at us. We rest halfway, dropping the couch on the sidewalk and draping ourselves across it, stretching our legs and shielding our eyes from the sun. Once we haul it up into the apartment, we push it against a living room wall and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking sugary wine and watching The Hills. We swig straight from our respective bottles, wipe our lips with the backs of our hands, and sing along to the theme song, episode after episode.
When the sky darkens and the wine runs out, we go to the corner store for more to drink while we get ready for the bar. Rilo Kiley blares from Bridget’s bedroom on the other end of the apartment as I flat-iron my hair and line my eyes. At one point, she appears in my bedroom doorway with a pair of scissors.
“I’m giving you bangs,” she says.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub while she snips at my hair with the paint-stained scissors, her laptop open to a photo of Jenny Lewis for reference. “Perfect,” she says, stepping aside so I can look in the mirror. I look like a little girl, two big eyes peering out from beneath a blunt fringe.
“You look amazing,” Bridget says.
I turn from side to side and wonder what Strane will think.
At the bar, I perch on a stool and guzzle pints, while Bridget is sidetracked by boys who pull her in for hugs as an excuse to lay their hands on her. She’s beautiful: high cheekbones and long honey hair, a gap between her front teeth that I’ve seen men go cross-eyed over. Meanwhile, I’m pretty but not beautiful, smart but not cool. I’m acerbic, salty, too intense. When Bridget’s fiancé met me, he said just being around me felt like a kick in the balls.
* * *
Atlantica College is morning fog and salt-drenched air, seals sunning their speckled bodies on the pink granite shore, whaler mansions converted into classrooms, a giant humpback skull hanging in the cafeteria. The school mascot is a horseshoe crab, and we’re all aware of how ridiculous this is, the bookstore stocked with sweatshirts that read got crabs? across the back. There aren’t any sports teams, the students call the president by her first name, and professors wear Teva sandals and T-shirts and bring their dogs to class. I love the college, don’t want to graduate, don’t want to leave.
Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.
I still feel different from others, dark and deeply bad, same as I did at fifteen, but I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of the reasons. I’ve become an expert of the age-gap trope, consuming books, films, anything featuring a romance between an adult and legal child. I search endlessly for myself but never find anything truly accurate. Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not—and it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I’ve never wanted to be, and if I don’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right? My freshman year roommate said that when I tried to stop her from going home drunk with some guy she met at a party. You can’t rape the willing. It’s a terrible joke, sure, but it makes sense.
And even if Strane did hurt me, all girls have old wounds. When I first came to Atlantica, I lived in a women’s dorm that was like Browick but more fraught, alcohol and pot easily available, minimal supervision. Open doors lined the hallways, and girls wandered from room to room late into the night, confessing secrets, laying their hearts bare. Girls I met only hours before wept beside me on my bed, telling me about their distant mothers and mean fathers and how their boyfriends cheated on them and that the world was a terrible place. None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better story to tell than theirs.
Sometimes it’s easier to think of it that way—as a story. Last fall I took a fiction writing workshop, and all semester I turned in pieces about Strane. While the stories were critiqued by the class, I took notes on what everyone said, copied down all their comments, even the stupid ones, the mean ones. If someone said, “I mean, she’s obviously a slut. Who has sex with a teacher? Who does something like that?” I wrote those questions in my notebook and then added my own: (Why did I do it? Because I’m a slut?)
I left that class feeling battered and bruised, but it seemed like penance, a deserved humiliation. Maybe there’s a comparison to be made between sitting silently through those brutal workshops and standing in that Browick classroom as questions were hurled at me, but I try not to let myself linger on thoughts like these. I keep my head down, keep going.
The professor teaching my capstone lit seminar is new. Henry Plough. I noticed his nameplate on the office next to my advisor’s the other day, the door ajar, showing an empty room with a desk and two chairs. At the first seminar meeting, I sit at the far end of the table, hungover, maybe still drunk, my skin and hair stinking of beer.
As I watch the other students filter in, each face familiar, my brain seems to spasm, a flash of light and wall of sound, an instant headache so strong I press my fingers against my eyes. When I open them again, Jenny Murphy is there—Jenny the former roommate, the fleeting best friend, the life ruiner. She sits at the seminar table, chin resting on her fist, her brown bobbed hair and the long line of her neck exactly the same. Has she transferred? My body trembles as I wait for her to notice me. How funny that neither of us has aged. I don’t look a day over fifteen, either, the same freckled face and long red hair.
I’m still fixated on her when Henry Plough comes into the classroom carrying a textbook, a leather bag slung over his shoulder. Dragging my eyes away from Jenny, I take him in, this new professor. At first glance, he is Strane, all beard and glasses, heavy footsteps and wide shoulders. Then the revisions reveal themselves: not dominatingly tall but average height, his hair and beard blond rather than black, brown eyes instead of gray, glasses horn-rimmed not wire frame. He’s slimmer, smaller, and he’s young—that’s the last thing I notice. No gray hairs, smooth skin beneath his beard, midthirties. He’s Strane in the pupal stage, still soft.
Henry Plough drops his copy of the textbook onto the seminar table and it thuds loudly, making everyone wince.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”
He picks it back up, holds it in his hands for a moment, unsure what to do, then sets it back down on the table carefully.