My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I hand him the notebook, hoping he won’t notice the doodles in the margins, the flowering vine crawling along the spine. It isn’t finished, but it isn’t terrible. I thumb through recent pages to find the one I’ve been working on for a couple weeks. It’s full of mostly half-finished poems, lines scrawled out and rewritten. I loosen my grip and open the notebook’s front cover. “Do you have something more finished you can show me?” His expression changes when he notices my face, my red-rimmed eyes. I curl into myself and grind the heels of my hands against my eyelids until I hear footsteps approach, crunching leaves and cracking twigs.

How did I think they were good? They’re blatantly bad. I look up and a towering silhouette blocks out the sun. I sit with my back against the tree and reach into my backpack, feeling past my geometry textbook to my spiral notebook, thinking I’ll feel better if I work on a poem first, but when I open to my latest one, a couple of stanzas about a girl trapped on an island who calls sailors to shore, I read over the lines and realize they’re bad-clumsy, disjointed, practically incoherent. I’m so worked up I’m sweating, and it’s only fifty degrees. I lean against the solitary maple tree that my eyes drift to during English class and touch the back of my hand to my hot cheeks. One afternoon I loop through campus three times, unsatisfied with all the places I try-the library too dark, my messy dorm room too depressing, everywhere else crowded with people studying in groups that only highlight me being alone, always alone-before I force myself to stop at the grassy slope behind the humanities building. Everywhere makes me antsy to be someplace else.

After classes I’m unable to settle down, moving from the library to the Gould common area to my dorm room and back to the library.

I should enjoy it, but instead the weather makes me restless, panicked. Campus looks like it did in the brochure I obsessed over as I filled out my Browick application-students in sweaters, the lawns a brilliant green, golden hour setting white clapboard aglow. Each morning the leaves are brighter, turning the rolling mountains around Norumbega into a mess of color. Late September arrives and for a week the weather is perfect, sunny and cool. Originally from eastern Maine, Russell holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Kansas and an MFA from Indiana University. The following is from Kate Elizabeth Russell's debut novel My Dark Vanessa.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell