My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I loved the math of it, three times my age, how easy it was to imagine three of me fitting inside him: one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.

Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. No one had ever understood that dark part of him until I came along.

That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.

It’s an indulgence, even with Ruby’s sliding scale—fifty bucks a week just to get someone to listen to me.

She doesn’t understand how satisfying sadness can be; hours spent rocking in the hammock with Fiona Apple in my ears make me feel better than happy.

same

It’s both creepy and out of my control, this ability I have to notice so much about other people when I’m positive no one notices anything at all about me.

If it’s going to be this hard, I wonder, why even bother? That’s a bad attitude to have, especially on the first day, and it makes me wonder what I’m doing at Browick in the first place, why they gave me a scholarship, why they thought I was smart enough to be here. It’s a spiral I’ve traveled before, and every time I arrive at the same conclusion: that there’s probably something wrong with me, an inherent weakness that manifests as laziness, a fear of hard work. 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.

“If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”

Sometimes teachers joke around in class, but I’ve never heard one say “fuck.” It never occurred to me that a teacher could.

can’t keep track of anything—textbooks end up wedged between my bed and the wall, homework smashed at the bottom of my backpack.

I stand in front of my bedroom mirror, study my face and hair and try to see myself as Mr. Strane sees me, a girl with maple-red hair who wears nice dresses and has good style, but I can’t get past the sight of myself as a pale, freckled child.

I’m trying to concentrate, but my brain feels like a rock skipping over water. Or, no—like a rock rattling around in a tin can. I

“No,” he says. “It’s for you.” He walks around the desk, puts the book in my hands: Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. “Have you read her?”

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. He says, “That reminded me of you.” Then he reaches behind me and tugs on my ponytail.

“You said you appreciated my honesty,” I say with a laugh. “I do,” he says. “I just appreciate it more when I’m in agreement with it.”

The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.

“I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”

“she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.” I have power. Power to make it happen. Power over him. I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

“Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love.

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,”

don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.

He calls me sensitive. “Like a . . .” He stops and softly laughs. “I was about to say like a little girl. I forget sometimes that’s exactly what you are.”

“You’re in charge here, Vanessa. You decide what we do.” 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.

doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.

inside. I start crying, really crying—still, he doesn’t stop. “You’re doing great,” he says. “Another deep breath, ok? It’s ok if it hurts. It won’t hurt forever. Just one more deep breath, ok? There we go. That’s nice. That’s so nice.”

I feel sick to my stomach when I think about him guiding my hand to his penis and don’t understand why he didn’t stop when I started to cry. That the thought I want to go home ran through my head the entire time we first did it.

I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.

Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight years old going on thirty. I’m not sure I was ever really a kid at all.

I’d almost certainly go to jail. And you’d end up in some foster home.” “Come on,” I scoff. “I would not go to a foster home.” “You’d be surprised.”

Your whole future would be out of your hands. You wouldn’t make it to college if that happened. You probably wouldn’t even graduate high school.

“You’re a baby, a little girl.” Then something in me shifts. I don’t touch myself, but I close my eyes and let my stomach flutter while I think about what he’s doing and that he’s thinking about me while he does it. “Will you do something for me?” he asks. “I want you to say something. Just a few words. Will you do that? Will you say a few words for me?” I open my eyes. “Ok.” “Ok? Ok. Ok.” There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’” For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I

I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans.

Even when I try to recall it now, I can’t quite remember. My brain veers away from the memory, repelled by a force beyond my control.

He says fifteen years old is a strange thing, a real paradox. That in the middle of your adolescence, you’re the bravest you’ll ever be because of how the brain works at this age, the combination of malleability and arrogance.

who left my apartment as soon as he could after I turned silent and unresponsive beneath him, my body curling into itself, hands hiding my face.

Ptsd

Because in the moment, it does feel like that—like I hate him. 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.

“Who do you need to say goodbye to, Vanessa? It’s not like you have any goddamn friends.” She watches as my eyes smart with tears but doesn’t look sorry. She looks like she’s waiting.

“It wasn’t the same with them, do you understand? It wasn’t like how it was with you. I loved you, Vanessa. I loved you.”

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.

“You know, sometimes I’m ashamed that you’re my kid,” she says.

“Vanessa,” she says gently, “you didn’t ask for that. You were just trying to go to school.”

He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.

I’m not a victim because I’ve never wanted to be, and if I don’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?

My thoughts tumble down a wormhole, dulled edges and gentle curves. I see the night ocean, waves hitting the granite shore. Strane is there, standing on a slab of pink granite, his hands cupped around his mouth. Let me do it. Let me pleasure you. He keeps calling, but I’m out of reach. I’m a speckled seal swimming past the breakers, a seabird with a wingspan so strong I can fly for miles. I’m the new moon, hidden and safe from him, from everyone.

Maybe that’s all it was. I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy.