I delete the post, but more comments start to appear, always in the middle of the night, waiting for me when I wake up. A line-by-line critique when I post a draft of a poem; Gorgeous left in response to a series of selfies. I reply, Who are you? but never receive a response. After that, the comments stop.
* * *
From my bedroom doorway, Bridget asks, “Are you coming?”
It’s the start of Spring Fling, a week of day drinking and blowing off classes. There’s a party that afternoon on the pier.
I look up from my laptop. “Hey, look at this.” Turning the screen, I show her Taylor Birch’s latest photo: a close-up selfie, her lips turned downward, eyes rimmed with black liner. When Bridget doesn’t react, I say, “That’s the girl who’s accusing him.”
“What about it?”
“It’s just so ridiculous.” I laugh. “The face she’s making! I want to comment and tell her to cheer up.”
Bridget gives me a long look, her lips pursed. Finally, she says, “Vanessa, she’s a kid.”
I turn the laptop away from her, feel my cheeks burn as I x out of the page.
“You really shouldn’t check her profile so much,” she says. “It’s only going to upset you.”
I snap the laptop shut.
“And making fun of her seems kind of mean.”
“Yeah, I get it,” I say. “Thanks for the input.”
She watches me get out of bed and stomp around my room, root through the piles of clothes on the floor. “So, are you coming?” she asks.
It’s only sixty-five degrees, but for April in Maine that’s as good as summer. There are cases of PBR stacked on the pier, hot dogs cooking on hibachi grills. Girls sunbathe in bikini tops, and three guys in board shorts climb over pink granite to wade up to their knees in the frigid water. Bridget finds a tray of Jell-O shots and we down three each, sucking them between our teeth. Someone asks about my postgraduation plans and I love having an answer: “I’m going to be Henry Plough’s assistant while I work on grad school applications.” At the sound of Henry’s name, a girl turns, touches my shoulder—Amy Doucette, from the capstone seminar.
“Are you talking about Henry Plough?” she asks. She’s tanked; her eyes won’t stop sliding around. “God, he’s so hot. Not physically, obviously, but intellectually. I want to crack his head open and take a big bite out of his brain. You know?” She laughs, slaps my arm. “Vanessa knows.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask, but she’s already turned away, her attention stolen by an enormous watermelon being broken open the same way she said she wanted to break open Henry’s skull. “It’s had two bottles of vodka soaked into it,” someone says. No one has a knife or plates, so people just grab handfuls, boozy juice dripping onto the pier.
I guzzle a can of warm beer and watch the waves through the gaps in the floorboards. Bridget comes over, a hot dog in each hand, offers me one. When I shake my head and say that I’m going to go, her shoulders drop.
“Why can’t you just have fun for once in your life?” she asks, but she sees the hurt on my face, understands she’s gone too far. As I leave, I hear her call, “I was kidding! Vanessa, don’t be mad!”
At first I head back home, but the thought of spending another drunken afternoon in bed makes me take a sharp turn toward Henry’s building, knowing he’s on campus Monday afternoons. I have his entire schedule memorized: when he’s on campus, when he’s teaching, and when he’s in his office, most likely alone.
The door is ajar, his office empty. On his desk sits a stack of papers and his wide-open laptop. I imagine plopping down in his chair and opening the desk drawers, sifting through everything inside.
He finds me standing over his desk. “Vanessa.”
I turn. His arms are weighed down with spiral notebooks, student journals from English composition, the things he hates most to grade. I know so much about him. It’s not normal to know this much.
As he sets the journals on his desk, I sink into the extra chair, hold my head in my hands.
“Did something happen to you?” he asks.
“No, I’m just drunk.” I tip my head back and see the grin on his face.
“You get drunk and your instincts tell you to come here? I’m flattered.”
I groan, press my palms against my eyes. “You shouldn’t be nice to me. I’m being inappropriate.”
Hurt flashes across his face. That was the wrong thing to say. I know better than anyone that calling too much attention to what we’re doing can ruin the whole thing.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull out my phone, hold it out for him as I scroll through the missed calls. “Do you see that? That’s how many times he’s been calling me. He won’t leave me alone. I’m going crazy.”
I don’t explain who “he” is because I don’t need to. Strane is probably at the forefront of Henry’s mind every time he looks at me. I wonder if they’ve met. I’ve imagined them shaking hands, the traces of me left on Strane’s body transmitted onto Henry—the closest I’ve come to touching him.
Henry stares hard at my phone. “He’s harassing you,” he says. “Can you block his number?”
I shake my head, though I have no idea. I probably could, but I want the calls to keep coming. They’re the breath on the back of my neck. I also know that Henry’s sympathy hinges on me doing and wanting the right things, taking all possible steps to protect myself.
“How’s this for harassment?” I say. “A few weeks ago, he mailed me a bunch of papers from when I was kicked out of Browick—”
“What?” Henry gapes at me. “I didn’t realize you were kicked out.”
Is that another lie? Technically, I withdrew—there was even a copy of the withdrawal form in the envelope Strane sent—but it feels more true to say I was kicked out, because it wasn’t my choice, even if it was my fault.
I listen to myself go on and tell the story, how I took the blame because I didn’t want to send Strane to jail, about the meetings and standing in front of the room and calling myself a liar, answering questions like it was a press conference. As he listens, Henry’s mouth falls open, sympathy emanates out of him, and the more affected he looks, the more I want to talk. A momentum gains within me, an increased righteousness, a sense that I lived through something horrible, a disaster so stark it split my life in two. And now, in the aftershock of survival comes the desire to tell. Shouldn’t I be able to tell this story if I want to? Even if I manipulate the truth and obscure the details, don’t I deserve to see the evidence of what Strane did to me on another person’s sympathetic face?
“Why would he do this?” Henry asks. “Is anything happening now to make him send you these things?”
“I’ve been ignoring him,” I say, “because of what’s been going on.”
“The complaint against him?”
I nod. “He’s worried I’m going to tell on him.”
“Would you consider doing that?” Henry asks.
I don’t answer, which is as good as saying no. Rolling my phone between my hands, I say, “You must think I’m terrible.”