My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two,

what

one of me curled around his brain, another around his heart, the third turned to liquid and sliding through his veins.

Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty. You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of 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.

Focusing on a single person isn’t the healthiest, that’s all I’m saying.”

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 my use of colorful language truly offends anyone here, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

At one point when I make a mistake, he reaches down and guides the mouse for me, his hand so big it covers mine completely.

She wrote a good essay last week. Maybe that’s all I am to him.

“I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”

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 try to smile, but I don’t like how he says “the best thing for you.” It brings up too much—memories of him saying the way I romanticized abuse was troubling, almost as troubling as the fact that I still kept in touch with the man who abused me.

Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened. It swallows me and all the times I wanted it, begged for it.

We tried to re-create the first time, me in flimsy pajamas, the lights low. It didn’t work. He kept going soft; I was too old.

WTF

Him kissing me used to be fodder for rumors that spread like wildfire. Now when we touch each other, the world doesn’t even notice. I know there should be freedom in that, but to me it only feels like loss.

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.

He’d be free to do whatever he wanted with me, no chance of getting caught.

He is Humbert, and I am Dolores.

that final scene of Humbert bloodstained and dazed, and still in love with Lo, even after how much she hurt him and how much he hurt her. His feelings for her are endless and out of his control. How can they not be, when the whole world demonizes him for them? If he were able to stop loving her, he would. His life would be so much easier if he left her alone.

He kisses the top of my head then, his own half kiss, and again I press my mouth against his neck. It’s a dialogue of half actions, neither of us fully committed. There’s still a chance to turn away, change our minds. Half kisses can be forgotten but full kisses cannot.

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.

“Some days I sit in your chair after you leave class. I rest my head on the table like I’m trying to breathe you in.”

ew

“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.

“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.

After a while he starts asking permission after he’s already done the thing he’s asking about.

It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.

I start crying, really crying—still, he doesn’t stop.

I’m nothing, no one, nowhere.

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

I know he wants the truth and that I should tell him I didn’t like being woken up by him hard and practically pushing into me. That I wasn’t ready to have sex this way. That it felt forced. But I’m not brave enough to say any of this—not even that 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.

We catch up with the group an hour later and I expect to be in trouble, but no one even noticed we were gone.

I’m special. I’m special. I’m special.

“What are you wearing?” he asks.

bruh

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.

but that doesn’t seem to bother Strane.

hmm wonder why

That’s the one he really cares about anyway.

girl…

his dark Vanessa. That should be enough. I’m lucky to have this, to be so loved.

Then I see the last name on the page—Jesse Ly.

“Who do you need to say goodbye to, Vanessa? It’s not like you have any goddamn friends.”

lol W mom

When she does, something falls, slides across the floor between us: the Polaroid of Strane and me on the village pier.

OMG

You didn’t see what you thought you did. He could convince her of anything, same as me.

gaslightning bitch

“Everything’s fine,” she says.

mom L

Longtime Browick Schoolteacher Found Dead in Norumbega River

little bitch

There’s no note, but I need no explanation. It’s all the evidence, every last bit he had.

The video ends and I gather the pictures, dump them back into the box. That fucking box. Ordinary girls have shoeboxes of love letters and dried-out corsages; I get a stack of child porn.

She spoke about it so openly, the r-word coming out of her as though it were the same as any other.

Not that I’ve been raped. Not raped raped. Strane hurt me sometimes, but never like that. Though I could claim he raped me and I’m sure I’d be believed.

I’m not going to call myself a victim. Women like Taylor find comfort in that label and that’s great for them, but I’m the one he called when he was on the brink. He said it himself—with me, it was different. He loved me, he loved me.