My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

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

“It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.”

When we cut through an empty register lane, I drop the lipstick among the candy bars.

Charley says that men are shit, but really she means boys.

She wipes away tears before they have a chance to fall, and I know she’s mad and that it must hurt like hell, but a part of me can’t help but think: what did she expect?

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

The next day I find Lolita back on my bookshelf.

If this is how I die, it wouldn’t be so bad.

“Look at you.” Charley laughs. “Surprisingly screwed up and brilliant.”

Every day I order coffee and pie while I read or finish homework, imagining that I look mysterious and adult sitting in a booth all by myself.

It’s something I could never wrap my head around, the idea that she could go through life writing about anything other than Strane if what he did to her was really so bad.

I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.

I need more evidence of his agony—pages and pages of it.

I want the moments before sex. I want him to take care of me.

When I wake again, I’m on my back, my dress bunched around my waist, my underwear off.

WTF

“Don’t.” He freezes. “You want me to stop?” My head rolls against the pillow. He waits a beat longer and then slowly starts to move in and out.

A thought shoots through me—is this rape? Is he raping me?

“Come on, at least pretend to be happy,” he says.

They seem like the real monsters, all those unspeakable things.

“Do you understand that someone could have been in a relationship similar to yours and consider it to have been abusive?”

“This is why I hate talking about it. I end up making it sound way worse than it actually was.”

I’m mad at the world that turned him into a monster when all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me.”

None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better story to tell than theirs.

“Nessa, come on.” He rests his face against my clamped thighs, gazes up at me. “Let me.”

I snake my arm out from under the covers and hold up my hand for a high five, which he ignores.

lol

The men who rape her cut out her tongue so she can’t speak and cut off her hands so she can’t write. Still, she’s so desperate to tell, she learns how to hold a stick in her mouth and scratches out the men’s names in the dirt.

It seems strange that his favorite line in the whole sordid novel is something so chaste. Not any of the descriptions of Lolita’s supple little body or Humbert’s attempts at self-justification, but an unexpectedly lovely image of a front yard weed.

“I was raped by a teacher there,” I say. “I was fifteen.”

omg

the lie

WHAT