My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

“Do the boys get whistles?” I ask.

Lucy and Deanna roll their eyes. “Why would boys need a whistle?” Deanna asks. “Use your brain.”

Besides, hardly anyone else at Browick seems to struggle like I do. They move from class to class knowing every answer, always prepared. They make it look easy.

Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

I wonder if he really believes that. He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.

I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing, he’d said. It sounds like delusion. What girl would want what he did to me? But it’s the truth, whether anyone believes it or not. Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.

I start to shake my head—it’s too big of a tip for something as routine as fresh towels, suspiciously big, enough to make me want to run. He waves the bill at me like you would a piece of food to a wary stray. Stepping back into the room, I take the money and, as I do, he runs his fingers over mine. Gives me a wink. “Thanks, honey,” he says.

Back in the lobby, safe behind the concierge desk, I take the twenty and shove it in my purse, tell myself I’ll spend it on pepper spray, a pocketknife, something I can carry on me even if I never use it. Just to know it’s there.

The implication of what being too attached to another girl might mean made my hair stand on end.

I know I’m being surveilled, but it also feels like being pursued, oppressive and flattering all at once.

For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone.

I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain.

The thought You’re fucking disgusting surges through me.

Sometimes when he’s on top of me, when he’s moaning with his eyes squeezed shut and not even noticing if I’m excited or sad or bored, I get the feeling all he really wants is to leave part of himself inside me, to stake his claim, not to impregnate me or anything like that, but something more permanent. He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.

He’s wearing the same clothes he had on when we hooked up before: black jeans, black T-shirt, black leather jacket, black combat boots—the uniform of the aging punks I always seem to end up going out with these days, men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.

The article says Strane groomed the girls. Groomed. I repeat the word over and over, try to understand what it means, but all I can think of is the lovely warm feeling I’d get when he stroked my hair.

Really, I just hate it when he gets angry at me, because that’s when I feel things that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, shame and fear, a voice urging me to run.

My fingers curl against the Polaroid. I imagine Strane here in the room, how he’d calm her down. It’s nothing, he’d say, his voice soothing as a balm. You didn’t see what you thought you did. He could convince her of anything, same as me. He’d guide her to the desk chair and make her a cup of tea. He’d slip the photo into his pocket, a movement so subtle and quick she wouldn’t even notice.

She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to. She meant it as a compliment. Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

To be

groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.

One of my best students. It’s a strange compliment coming from a man who once turned a student into a wife.

All of this feels like performance, because I’ve seen how it plays out, how quickly people lift their hands and say, It happens sometimes, or Even if he did do something, it couldn’t have really been that bad, or What could I have done to stop it? The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.

It feels like this is the moment when I’m supposed to open my arms and embrace her, to start thinking of her as a kind of sister. Maybe that could happen if our stories were closer, if I were nicer—though it seems absurd to expect two women to love each other just because they were groped by the same man. There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.