Summary

Vanessa returns the narrative to 2006, the fall semester of her senior year at Atlantica. She is 21. She drifts through her classes, indifferent to plans after graduation. She has few friends and lives with a roommate, Bridget, more out of practicality than friendship. She maintains a sexual relationship with Strane even as she struggles with her self-esteem. As they make love in the mess of her apartment bedroom, she forbids Strane from performing oral sex on her, feeling in that restriction a kind of control over what has become the defining obsession of her life. She has never had other relationships. “I’m pretty but not beautiful, smart but not cool. I’m acerbic, salty, too intense” (269). She does not feel part of the college community. In her capstone literature class, she meets her professor Henry Plough, a youngish scholarly type with whom Vanessa...