My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him. Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could talk to me, confide in me. 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.

I loved Strane’s middle-aged caution, his slow courtship. He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands—Emily, Edna, Sylvia. He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air.

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.

Suddenly, I’m full of need—to be reassured, to hear him say, plainly, that of course he didn’t do what that girl says he did. I need him to say again that she’s lying, that she was a liar ten years ago and is a liar still, taken in now by the siren song of victimhood.

But then, in the half whisper that turns my bones to milk,

I don’t remember, not exactly. So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete. I need him to fill in the gaps, though sometimes the girl he describes sounds like a stranger.

Mom says dwelling in your feelings is no way to live, that there will always be something to be upset about and the secret to a happy life is not to let yourself be dragged down into negativity. 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.

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 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.”

The nine other students pack up their things and leave the classroom to carry on with their lives, to practices and rehearsals and club meetings. I leave the room, too, but I’m not part of them. They’re the same, but I’m changed. I’m unhuman now. Untethered. While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail. I’m no longer myself; I am no one. I’m a red balloon caught in the boughs of a tree. I’m nothing at all.

I forget sometimes exactly how old he is; I used to think the gap between us would shrink as I grew older, but it’s still as wide as it’s ever been.

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.

He said he wanted to kiss me. He touched me. Every interaction between us is tinged now with something potentially ruinous, and it isn’t fair for him to pretend otherwise.

The poem isn’t meant to be a celebration of going against the grain but rather an ironic performance about the futility of choice. He says that by believing our lives have endless possibilities, we stave off the horrifying truth that to live is merely to move forward through time while an internal clock counts down to a final, fatal moment.

It isn’t only the plot, its story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her.

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

Things happen right in front of them. It’s like they’re all too ordinary to notice.

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.

He said me naked is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It would be cruel for me to counter that with disgust. It 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.

He whispers, “We made love, didn’t we?” and I gauge the distance between “fuck” and “made love.”

They’re adults living actual fulfilling lives. They have no reason to remember what happened back then, or even to remember me.

When I’m around girls their age, the magic age Strane taught me to mythologize, I feel myself become him.

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?

When I’m home over February break, I go to the grocery store with Mom and, as an experiment, stare at every single man, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones. Who knows how long it’s been since a girl last looked at them this way. I feel sorry for them, how desperate they must be, how lonely and sad. When the men notice me looking, they’re visibly confused, brows knit as they try to figure me out. Only a few recognize what I am, a hardness taking over their faces as they match my stare.

There are things he needs to believe in order to live with himself, and it would be cruel for me to label these as lies.

How could I ever have thought of myself as helpless when I alone have the power to save him?

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.

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.

Embarrassment creeps up my spine as I realize he probably wasn’t thinking about me at all in that moment. There isn’t a single moment when I’m not thinking about him.

I stare out the window over her shoulder, at the harbor, the swarming gulls, the slate-gray water and sky, but I only see myself, barely sixteen with tears in my eyes, standing in front of a room of people, calling myself a liar, a bad girl deserving of punishment. Ruby’s far-off voice asks me where I’ve gone, but she knows that it’s the truth that has spooked me, the expanse of it, the starkness. It offers nowhere to hide.

It’s just so typical, you know? That way he’d berate himself to make you feel sorry for him.”

Beating yourself up in the hopes of gaining sympathy—what person doesn’t do that every now and then?

“It might seem small to you,” she says. “But it was enough to wreck me.”

“I 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.”

She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.

Think of all the thoughtless pain we inflict. A mosquito on your arm; you don’t even hesitate to smack it dead.

I need someone to show me the line that’s supposed to separate twenty-seven years older from thirteen years, teacher from professor, criminal from socially acceptable. Or maybe I’m supposed to encompass the difference here. Years past my eighteenth birthday, I’m fair game now, a consenting adult.

This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.

This, I realize, is where it was always going to end up. I gave him permission to do the unspeakable things he always craved, offered up my body as the site of the crimes, and he indulged for a while, but in his heart, he’s not a villain. He’s a man who wants to be good, and I know as well as anyone that the easiest way to do that is to cut out the thing that makes you bad.

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.

I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be.