My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us. That’s how I described the difference back then—perfect. 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.

Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

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

In the bathroom I try to make as little sound as possible as I peel off my clothes and break the tags off the pajamas.

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

I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it’s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.

“We aren’t always going to fit together the way we do now.”

“Vanessa, when you look back, you’ll remember me as someone who loved you, just one of many. I guarantee your life is going to be so much bigger than me.”

He says there’s no reasoning with me when I get like this, when I act like a child.

Back in my room, I lie facedown on my bed and breathe into my pillow to calm myself out of hating him. Because in the moment, it does feel like that—like I hate him.

“I’d rather end my life right now than go through that,” Strane

I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.

Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

“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.”

All interesting women had older lovers when they were young. It’s a rite of passage.

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

“Jailbait” means having the power to turn a man into a criminal with just one touch.

“He was a grown man and you were fifteen,” she says. “What could you have possibly done to torture him?”

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

Someone so stuck in her own brain, she turns unwilling bystanders into ghosts.

There’s satisfaction in seeing my life contort another person’s face into shock and awe, but a second too long and their awe turns to gawking.

Sometimes it really does feel like a curse, the meaning I can attach to anything.

“Hearing him, seeing him, everything I do being laced with him.”

can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”

Maybe that’s what this has always been about—not wanting these men but wanting to be them.

“It didn’t feel finished,” I say. “I still felt tied to you.”

“You’re an enigma,” Henry says. “Impossible to understand.”

An older man using a girl to feel better about himself—how easily the story becomes a cliché if you look at it without the soft focus of romance.

“You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story—teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it—they’re done. “You’ve got serious issues,” they say on their way out the door.

It’s my own fault. I was supposed to have grown out of it by now. He never promised to love me forever.

“All of me. Everything about me leads back to him. If I cut out the poison, nothing will be left.”

There must be a point where you’re allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.