Lisa Unger: Darkness My Old Friend

She lifted her eyes to Mr. Vance, her English teacher, who was watching her expectantly.

“I didn’t hear the question.” She felt the heat rise to her cheeks as someone in the back of the room giggled.

“The question was,” he said, “can you tell me the difference between a simile and a metaphor?”

She didn’t mean to roll her eyes. But sometimes they seemed to have a mind of their own. Mr. Vance crossed his arms and squared his shoulders. A dare.

“A simile is a literary device that compares things, using the connector like or as . As in ‘His eyes were blue and beckoning, like the deep, wide ocean.’ A metaphor is a figure of speech that equates one unlike thing with another. For example, ‘Her love for him was a red, red, rose.’ ”

She’d played it vampy, flirty, just to save face. But it came off wrong. From the zombies there was more nervous giggling. What a dork . The words wafted up from the stoners in the back of the room like a plume of smoke. Mr. Vance wore a high red blush-anger, embarrassment, maybe a little of both.

When Willow was younger, her mother used to say, Your mouth is going to get you into trouble, kid . Then, That mouth, Willow. Watch your words . Lately the admonishment came so often that her mother had simply shortened it to Mouth!

Mr. Vance did have the prettiest blue eyes. He was a preppy, neatly pressed, hairstyled, shiny-new-gold-wedding-band kind of clean. But she wasn’t crushing on him or anything. She liked him. Most teachers just found her “challenging,” “distracted,” “bright but undisciplined,” or “difficult to engage.” There were as many descriptions as there were parent-teacher conferences, most of them negative.

But Mr. Vance was different. He let her talk, didn’t become frustrated by her questions: Wasn’t there evidence that Shakespeare really was a woman? Didn’t his sister really do all the writing and he just took the credit? Did anyone else find Hemingway flat and inaccessible? Or Moby-Dick dull in the extreme? When Mr. Vance had met her mother during the last parent-teacher night, he’d told her that he thought Willow was “gifted” but often bored and “needed lots of challenge and stimulation to really excel.” He was the first teacher with whom she had ever really connected. And now she’d fucked it up. Screwed it up. Her mother didn’t like it when Willow said “fuck.” Use that imagination of yours, Willow; swearing is for people with small vocabularies .

“That’s right, Willow,” said Mr. Vance. He turned his back on her and walked to the front of the room. “That’s right.”

He returned to his lecture on literary devices, but Willow didn’t hear another word, just sulked the rest of the class. Usually she hung around to talk to him after the bell rang, but today he left before she could put her things in her bag. It was familiar, that feeling of having said the wrong thing and driving someone off, that sinking disappointment, that pointless wishing that she’d watched her words.

On her army-green locker, someone had scratched the word freak into the paint. They’d done this at the beginning of the year, and she hadn’t complained or even tried to cover it. She liked it. The Hollows was a social and cultural void, populated by the petty, the small-minded, the unimaginative; here she was a freak and proud of it. She wanted all of them to know that she was different. She wasn’t a freak in New York City, where she’d lived all her life until her exile to The Hollows six months ago.

She rifled through the backpack and found her cell phone. She dialed and tucked it between shoulder and ear while she bent down to retie the laces on her Doc Martens, straighten out her fishnet tights.

“How’s life in the fast lane, kiddo?” her mother answered.

“It sucks.” She leaned heavily against her locker and watched the sea of morons wash down the hallway. Lots of giggling and shouting and running, sneakers squeaking.

Her mom sighed. “What’s wrong?”

Willow told her about the incident with Mr. Vance. “I was just kidding.”

“Well, what do we do when we hurt or embarrass someone we care about?”

“We try to make amends,” Willow said. Why had she even called? She could have predicted the entire conversation verbatim.

“Sounds like you know what to do.”

“Okay,” Willow said. “Yeah.”

She tucked herself against her locker. She wanted to ask her mom to come get her. The first couple of weeks, Willow had called and begged to be picked up, and her mother had complied. But then her mom said no more; Willow would have to ride out the school day no matter how miserable she was. And when her mom said no more, she meant it.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too. And, Willow? I know things aren’t easy for us right now. But they’re going to get better. I promise. Just try to find small ways to be happy.”

“I’ll try.”

“Art class next, right?”

“Yup.”

“That should be fun.”

Willow hated that forced brightness in her mother’s voice. It reminded her that her mother was suffering, too.

“Woo- hoo !” she said.

“Okay, smarty.” Her mom laughed a little. “Hold it together over there.”

After ending the call, Willow traded her textbooks for the art supplies in her locker and slammed the door.

“Nice backpack.” The nasty voice carried down the hall, bounced off the walls. Willow turned to see Becka Crim surrounded by her plastic, pretty clones. Their designer bags-Juicy Couture, Coach, Kate Spade-seemed to gleam with malice. She’d bought hers at the army-navy store. It was cool. Too cool for school. Willow flipped them off and kept walking, listening to them all laughing.

“Her love for him was a red, red rose.”

She didn’t know which one of them said it. But it hardly mattered. None of those morons were in her AP English class, but they’d already heard about what had happened in class. Perfect .

The door to Mr. Vance’s office was closed. Through the frosted glass, she could see his shadow behind the desk. She felt a flutter of nerves but lifted her hand and knocked on the door, anyway.

“Come in.”

She pushed the door open, and he lifted his eyes from the file on his desk, then dropped them again. She hovered in the doorway, unsure if she wanted to go in.

“What can I do for you, Willow?” he said when she didn’t enter. He looked at her, brow creased into a frown.

“I came to apologize,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

He motioned toward the chair opposite his desk. As she sat, the bell rang and she heard someone break into a run, a door close. She was late for art class.

“Let me explain something to you,” said Mr. Vance. “We’re friends, right? We have a relationship of sorts-we talk about books, we spend extra time discussing topics from class.”

“Right,” she said. On his desk she saw the picture of Mr. Vance, cheek to cheek with a smiling woman she assumed was his wife. Willow had thought his wife would be prettier for some reason, imagined her tall and blond. But she was kind of on the plain side, with mousy hair and glasses. She seemed happy, though. And nice.

“But it’s delicate,” said Mr. Vance. “Any hint that there’s something inappropriate going on and that’s my career. Do you understand that? I have a wife, a baby on the way. I need my job, my reputation.”

She felt heat flood her cheeks, the threat of tears. “I didn’t mean-” she started to say. Then, “I’m sorry.”

“You embarrassed me,” he said.

She started to apologize again, but her throat closed up. She wouldn’t be able to talk without crying. The room was hot, and she suddenly felt too close to Mr. Vance. She stood, just wanting to be away from him, his disapproving stare, so different from his usual smile and mischievous gaze. His face was pale, his mouth pulled taut. They wouldn’t be friends after this; she could tell. She bumped the chair as she backed up, and it made a loud scraping sound on the floor. His face softened then.