CHAPTER 11 - CONFINEMENT

The underwear is gone and I can still smell him on my fingers when I brush my teeth, and I’m thinking about golden eyes and growling walls and stolen fabric while I walk into Advanced Literature ten minutes early like the overachieving tragedy that I am.

The classroom is a small amphitheater – tiered seating, the kind of room that smells like old paper and academic self-importance – and I take a seat in the third row and open my textbook and tell myself that this is a class about literature and nothing else.

My stepfather, Dominic Voss, walks in at exactly 9 AM and the room rearranges itself around him.

He’s wearing a charcoal suit that fits him like an apology for every ill-fitting suit that has ever existed, and his glasses sit low on the bridge of his nose in a way that makes him look like he’s perpetually evaluating whether you’re worth looking at over the rims, and the answer for most people appears to be no.

He sets his briefcase on the desk with the kind of precise, unhurried motion that tells you this is a man who has never rushed a single thing in his life and doesn’t intend to start for you.

He doesn’t look at me. Not when he opens his notes, not when he begins the lecture on Victorian confinement narratives. I’m sitting in the third row directly in his line of sight and he looks through me like I’m made of glass, and the dismissal stings in a way that I wasn’t expecting because I’ve spent my whole life being invisible and I was GOOD at it until approximately one week ago when his son made me visible against my will – and now being unseen by Dominic feels less like safety and more like a punishment.

He paces the front of the room while he talks and his hands move with the kind of deliberate grace that makes you watch them even when you’re trying not to, and his voice is this low, steady instrument that he wields the way his son wields silence – as a weapon that you don’t recognize until it’s already inside you.

Every word is precisely placed and unhurried and when he pauses between points the silence in the room has a quality to it that makes thirty students lean forward without realizing they’re doing it.

He’s fifteen minutes into the symbolism of locked rooms in Brontë when he says, without looking up from his notes, “Ms. Cross. What does the red room represent in Jane Eyre?”

Every head in the room turns toward me. I haven’t done the reading. I haven’t done any reading that isn’t the back of my own eyelids at 1:47 AM for the past week, and the question lands in my lap like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

“It’s, um – it represents confinement,” I say, which is technically true but so surface-level that I can feel the inadequacy of it hanging in the air between us.

He waits. He doesn’t prompt me or help me or move on. He just stands there with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes finally – FINALLY – on mine, and the weight of his attention is so different from his son’s that it takes me a second to understand what I’m feeling.

He’s not looking AT me – he’s looking INTO me, and the precision of it makes me want to squirm in my seat because it feels like he can see every single thing I’ve done this week written on my face like a confession.

The silence stretches until the girl next to me shifts uncomfortably in her seat and I want to melt into the floor and die.

He moves on without comment, which is somehow worse than if he’d torn my answer apart, because the absence of a response is its own kind of cruelty – the kind that says you weren’t even worth correcting.

The rest of the lecture is forty-five minutes of me pretending to take notes while my handwriting deteriorates with every pass he makes across the front of the room.

He rolls his sleeves to the elbow at the twenty-minute mark like it means nothing, and his forearms are lean and corded and there’s a watch on his left wrist that glints every time he gestures.

I find myself tracking the movement of his hands the way I track Knox’s hands except with Knox the anticipation is about where his hands are going and with Dominic the anticipation is about the restraint of where his hands are NOT going, and I don’t know which is worse.

He makes eye contact with me exactly once more during the lecture. It lasts two seconds. He’s making a point about how Brontë uses physical space as a metaphor for psychological imprisonment and his gaze sweeps the room and catches on mine and holds, and in those two seconds his expression doesn’t change at all but something behind his eyes shifts like a door opening a crack before being pulled firmly shut, and then he’s looking at someone else and I’m sitting in my chair with my pulse in my throat wondering if I imagined it.

I didn’t imagine it.

After class I go to his office, which is a decision I make with my legs before my brain approves it, and I knock on the open door and he’s behind his desk with his glasses still on and his pen moving across a stack of papers with that same unhurried precision.