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For the past month, something’s been gaining momentum, a wave of women outing men as harassers, assaulters. It’s mostly celebrities who have been targeted—musicians, politicians, movie stars—but less famous men have been named, too. No matter their background, the accused go through the same steps. First, they deny everything. Then, as it becomes clear the din of accusations isn’t going away, they resign from their jobs in disgrace and issue a statement of vague apology that stops short of admitting wrongdoing.
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.
Close with my mother? I don’t argue but don’t agree. Sometimes I marvel at how easily I deceive people, doing it without even trying.
She doesn’t understand how satisfying sadness can be;
and a quilt she made of old T-shirts I’d outgrown,
U got this from twilight
the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.”
Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time,
As though it’s all in my head, a narrative sprung without a source.
It’s enough to make me crazy, seeing these things that no one else ever seems to notice.
“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.
“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful,”
I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.
It’s a question, but he isn’t really asking.
My mind feels like the lake on a calm day, glassy and still. I’m nothing, no one, nowhere.
When I’m around girls their age, the magic age Strane taught me to mythologize, I feel myself become him. Questions pile up in my mouth, ones designed to make them linger. I bite down hard to keep them from pouring out—what are your names, how old are you, do you want more cigarettes, or beer, or weed? It’s so easy for me to imagine how it must’ve been for him, desperate enough to give a girl whatever she wanted to keep her close.
“I’ll bet for as long as you can remember, you were called mature for your age. Weren’t you?”
I wonder if she would be hurt if I said I don’t really feel anything at all toward her anymore. That I can’t remember why losing her friendship had felt like losing the world, or why that friendship seemed so profound, never to be repeated.
“Why do any girls have to be bad apples? Why do we have to be apples at all?”
there’s another option for those brave enough to take it: bypass boys altogether, go straight to men. Men who will never make you wait; men who are starved and grateful for scraps of attention, who fall in love so hard they throw themselves at your feet.
Do you remember how that felt?” I say yes, though I know that what I felt and what he felt are probably two different things.
“First love is so special,” she says. “You’ll never forget it.”
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.
There are things he needs to believe in order to live with himself,
darkness in him, the darkness in me—he’s
men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.
“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—”
Its already attached
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.
We’re miles from anyone and anywhere, free to do whatever we want, our isolation as safe as it is dangerous. I don’t know how to feel one without the other anymore.
“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,
If I were smart, I’d burn everything, especially the photos,
I could never. It would be like setting myself on fire.
“Isn’t that sad?” Charley asks. “Do you think I’m pathetic?”
Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.
she stares at me as though she’s never seen me before, like she has no idea who I am.
I just like the attention.
I understand
Charley says that men are shit, but really she means boys.
He doesn’t understand how this works, doesn’t get that I don’t want to pass for eighteen and that I have zero interest in going to the movies as though he were a boy my own age.
“You don’t get to change the facts to suit the story you want to tell.”
First love is so special, she said. You’ll never forget it.
I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.
What happened to me wasn’t anything like that.” I sit back, cross my arms. “This is why I hate talking about it. I end up making it sound way worse than it actually was.”
“Knowing you, Vanessa, I think you’re more likely to minimize than exaggerate.”
“I’m needy.” It’s the closest I can get to saying what I feel, which isn’t horniness, because it isn’t really about sex. It’s him looking at me, adoring me, telling me what I am and giving me what I need to get through the day-to-day drudgery of pretending I’m like everybody else.
He’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way I can stay young and dripping with beauty.
“Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.”
how do I know the book so well? I told him it’s mine. That it belongs to me. I said, “You know how sometimes there’s a book that’s yours?” And he nodded, like he understood exactly.
“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.”
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”
