My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I assume I’ll be the one he turns to in ten or fifteen years, whenever his body begins to break down. 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.

“I wonder what they think about you spending so much time with me.” I don’t know who he means by “they”—other students or teachers, or maybe he means everyone, reducing the entire world down to a collective other. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say. “Why’s that?” “Because no one ever notices anything I do.” “That isn’t true,” he says. “I notice you all the time.”

For years, I’ve imagined this—being in front of him again, within reach—but now that I’m here, I just feel outside myself, like I’m watching from a table across the room. It doesn’t seem right that we can speak to each other like normal people, or that he can bear to look at me without falling to his knees.

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.

I lie in bed and flip through Lolita until I find the line I’m looking for on page 17. Humbert, describing the qualities of the nymphet hidden among ordinary girls: “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.

“It’s ok.” “It’s not ok.” His hand slips out from under my skirt and he slides like liquid out of his chair and onto the floor. Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, “I’m going to ruin you.” It’s the most unbelievable thing that has happened so far, more surreal than him saying he wanted to kiss me or his hand stroking my leg. “I’m going to ruin you.” He says it with obvious torment, a glimpse into how much he’s thought about it, wrestled with it. He wants to do the right thing, doesn’t want to hurt me, but has resigned himself to the likelihood that he will.

“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.

He traces road maps of blue veins on my skin, talks about how hungry I make him, that he’d eat me if he could. I wordlessly offer him my arm. Go ahead. He gives it only a soft-mouthed bite, but I would probably let him tear me apart. I’d let him do anything.

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. “Right now,” he says, “at fifteen, you probably feel older than you will at eighteen or twenty.”

“I understand it might be tempting,” Strane says, choosing each word with care, “to join in on the hysteria going on right now. And I know it would be easy for you to depict what happened between us as . . . inappropriate or abusive or whatever other label suits your mood. There’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to turn me into whatever you wanted . . .” He trails off, takes a breath. “But my god, Vanessa, do you really want this attached to you for the rest of your life? Because if you do this, if you come forward, it’s going to stick to you—”

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.

Is it really impossible to imagine that I might emerge from this worldly and wise, a girl with a story to tell? Someday when people ask me, “Who was your first lover?” the truth will set me apart. Not some ordinary boy, but an older man: my teacher. He loved me so desperately I had to leave him behind. It was tragic, but I didn’t have a choice. That’s just how the world works.

“Your name and photo will be in the papers,” he says. “You’ll be all over the news.” He speaks slowly, carefully, like he wants to make sure I understand. “This will follow you around forever. You’ll be branded for life.” I want to say, Too late. That I walk around every day feeling permanently marked by him, but maybe that’s unfair.

My voice cracks, a sob chokes out, and it feels like observing someone else cry, a woman playing the role of me. I remember my college roommate Bridget saying, after I first told her about Strane, Your life is like a movie. 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. Isn’t that what all teenage girls want? Endlessly bored, aching for an audience.

“I don’t feel like I know you anymore.” “You’ll always know me,” he says. “I haven’t changed. I’m too old for that.” “I’ve changed.” “I’m sure you have.” “I’m not naive like I was when you knew me.” He tilts his head. “I don’t remember you ever being naive.”

“Would I be here if I didn’t want this?” I ask, as though the answer were obvious. I ignore what hangs in the air above us, my anger, my humiliation and hurt. They seem like the real monsters, all those unspeakable things.

I know how easily I could make my most shameful behaviors add up to a diagnosis. I’ve lost entire nights to reading about post-traumatic stress, mentally checking off each symptom, but there’s a strange letdown at the thought of everything inside me being summed up so easily. And what’s next—treatment, medication, moving past it all?

Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.”

He’s still inside me, trying to keep me seeing them the same way he did, a series of nameless girls sitting at a seminar table. He needs me to remember they were nothing. He could barely differentiate between them. They never mattered to him. They were nothing compared to me. I loved you, he says. My dark Vanessa.

“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.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”

“What about grad school? Are you still going to apply?” Looking ahead, I can see that, too—another classroom, another man at the head of the seminar table reading my name off the roster, his eyes drinking me in. The thought makes me so tired all I can think is I’d rather be dead than go through this again.

“No,” she says, “you didn’t fail me. Or, if you did, then I did, too. I knew he’d hurt other girls and it still took me years to do anything about it.” She looks up at me then, her eyes two blue pools. “What could we have done? We were just girls.” I know what she means—not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be. Who would have believed us, who would have cared?