My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

He only wanted to make sure I’d stay quiet. He used me again. How many times? What’s it going to take, Vanessa?

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.

like I’m watching a movie with a disorienting plot. Truly, everything feels like a simulation, unreal. I have no choice but to pretend I’m the same as ever, but a canyon surrounds me now, sets me apart. I’m not sure if sex created the canyon or if it’s been there all along and Strane finally made me see it. Strane says it’s the latter. He says he sensed my difference as soon as he laid eyes on me. “Haven’t you always felt like an outsider, a misfit?” he asks. “I’ll bet for as long as you can remember, you were called mature for your age. Weren’t you?” I think back to third grade, how it felt to bring home a report card with a teacher’s note scribbled across the bottom: Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight years old going on thirty. I’m not sure I was ever really a kid at all.

I denied being jealous, but of course I was, both of her and of him. I wanted it all—a boyfriend and a best friend, someone to love me enough that nobody could weasel their way between us. It was a pulsating, monstrous wanting beyond my control. I knew it was too much to feel, let alone show, yet I couldn’t stop it

I didn’t argue further; I shut down, stopped speaking to her, and we fell into the silent standoff that had held until now. Deep down, I knew she was right; I did love her too much, and I couldn’t imagine ever stopping. But less than a year later, here I am, not caring.

Strane starts appearing everywhere, like he’s trying to keep an eye on me. He shows up in the dining hall and watches me from the faculty table. He’s in the library during study hour, browsing the bookcase directly in front of me. He walks past the open classroom door during my French class, stealing a glance at me each time. I know I’m being surveilled, but it also feels like being pursued, oppressive and flattering all at once.

When he starts talking like this, my brain can’t keep up. It feels like he’s exaggerating, but I get too overwhelmed and lose track of what I believe. He can make even the most outrageous things seem feasible.

I avoid looking at his naked body by watching dust motes swirl in the weak winter sun tinged green from the sea glass window. 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.

Crimson-barred, maple-red hair. I think of what I said when he showed me the Jonathan Swift poem, about all this feeling destined. I hadn’t really meant it then. I said it only to show him how happy and willing I was. But seeing my name on the page this time feels like a free fall, a loss of control. Maybe this really was predetermined. Maybe I was made for this.

“He’s never talked to you about me?” The wrinkles in her forehead deepen. The look lasts only for a second. If I wasn’t on high alert, I wouldn’t even notice it. “Can’t say that he has,” she says. “That’s surprising,” I say. “He and I are pretty close.” I watch the suspicion bloom on her face, a sense of something amiss.

The curtness of his response makes me laugh out loud, as does Ms. Thompson’s nervousness, her little smiley faces, the dot-dot-dots stringing together incomplete sentences. It occurs to me that maybe she isn’t a smart person, or at least not as smart as me. I’ve never thought that about a teacher before.

For me, there’s nothing before him, nothing at all, but I know that’s not the point. This is about him needing something from me. Not quite forgiveness, more like absolution, or maybe apathy. He needs me not to care about the things he’s done. “Ok,” I say. “I won’t be jealous anymore.” It feels so generous, like I’m making a sacrifice for him. I’ve never felt so adult.

She meant to be reassuring, but her logic was easy to follow: boys never paid attention to me, therefore I wasn’t pretty, and if I wasn’t pretty, I’d have to wait a long time before anyone noticed me, because boys had to mature before they cared about anything else.

It’s funny to think how wrong Mom was about all that. Because 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.

I stay indifferent, a little annoyed, until he starts saying, “You’re a baby, a little girl.” Then something in me shifts. I don’t touch myself, but I close my eyes and let my stomach flutter while I think about what he’s doing and that he’s thinking about me while he does it.

No big deal. I’ll let her flirt and hang around the classroom a bit, nothing further than that. But the more time I spent with you, I started to think, my god, this girl is the same as me. Separate from others, craving dark things. Right? Aren’t you? Don’t you?” He waits for my answer, for me to say yes, I am those things, but what he describes isn’t how I’ve ever thought of myself, and his memory of me chasing after him seems wrong, too.

“When we’re together,” he says, “it feels as though the dark things inside me rise to the surface and brush against the dark things inside you.”

I turn back to the computer, the journalist’s email. Getting your truth out there. My truth. As though I have any idea what that is.

The hotel owner passes by and notes how professional I look. He likes my posture, how there’s nothing but empty appeasement behind my eyes.

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.

I take a big bite to buy time before answering. Some questions he asks me are normal and some are tests. This one sounds like a test.

We were in the midst of a fight about me going away to college—I said I didn’t want to, he said I shouldn’t let myself be sidetracked, not by anyone or anything, including him, which made me cry, and then he said I was trying to manipulate him by crying. I thought the lyrics might help him understand how I felt, but he never said anything about it. I wonder if he even read them.

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.

Maybe there’s safety in what he says, a chance to walk away unscathed and unbound. 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. Strane reaches for me as he

Back in my room, I lie facedown on my bed and breathe into my pillow to calm myself out of hating him. Because in the moment, it does feel like that—like I hate him. Really, I just hate it when he gets angry at me, because that’s when I feel things that probably shouldn’t be there in the first place, shame and fear, a voice urging me to run.

My parents stare straight ahead, their anger and grief palpable enough to taste. I open my mouth to let it all in and swallow it whole, where deep in my belly it turns into blame.

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.

Slowly guided into the fire—why is everyone so scared to admit how good that can feel? To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.

I say nothing, stare down at the damselflies. I do feel better, or at least better than I did a month ago when I left Browick, but admitting it feels too much like moving on.

When I was younger, my parents used to say I sounded like a mourning dove, always sulking, always so damn sad.

Let it go. When I first realized she wasn’t going to tell anyone, I was relieved, but now, it’s started to flatten out into something like disappointment. Because the deal seems to be, if you want me to keep this secret, then we have to pretend it never happened—and I can’t do that.

she writes the words NEVER FORGET. Yet all I can think about is Strane, my own loss. In my notebook, I write, Our country was attacked. It is a tragic day. Close the front cover, open it again and add, And yet all I care about is myself. I am selfish and bad. I hope the words will shame me. They do nothing.

I wave her off, say that it’s fine, but what she said stings. Maybe it hurts because it might be true. Maybe I wasn’t loved enough. Maybe that lack of love shaped the loneliness he saw in me.

The weather cools to a raw gray. The leaves change and fall, the woods turn sparse with skeletal trees. I learn things about myself: that if I limit myself to five hours of sleep, I’m too tired to care what happens around me; if I wait until dinnertime to eat anything, hunger pains drown out any other feelings.

block his screen name, delete all our chats and emails, and fake sick the next day, grateful that at least I never told him exactly where I live so there’s no chance he’ll find me at home. When I return to school, I carry my house key so it sticks out between my fingers as I walk from the school doors to the bus. I imagine him grabbing me from behind, forcing me into his truck, and then who knows what. Rape and murder me, probably. Carry my corpse to the movies so we can finally have that stupid date he always went on about. After a week passes and nothing happens, I stop holding my key like a weapon and unblock his screen name to see if he’ll message me. He doesn’t. He’s gone. I tell myself I’m relieved.

She’s right; I did lie. I sat there and let her believe what she wanted and felt no remorse. It didn’t even really feel like lying, more like shaping the truth to fit what she needed to hear, an act of contortion I learned from Strane—and I was good at it, able to manipulate the truth so covertly she had no idea what I’d done. Maybe I should have felt guilt afterward, but all I remember feeling is pride for getting away with it, for knowing how to protect her, him, myself, everyone at once.

Rather than deal with finding a new place to sit in the cafeteria, I give up altogether and start spending lunch period at the diner in the strip mall. 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. Sometimes I feel men looking at me from their counter stools, and sometimes I meet their gaze, but it always ends there.

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 thank them and try not to act too excited by the thought of the places a car can take me.

At the time, I was how old? I count in my head: six, a first grader, barely a person and nine years away from being in bed with him, squirming under his hands as he told me to calm down, that I couldn’t get pregnant, he’d had a vasectomy.

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 stayed only long enough to see her walk to the microphone and start to speak. Her great big grin and wild, gesticulating hands. She was fine—that’s what I told myself as I walked home, my cheeks flushed with something between jealousy and relief.

looking like a Lolita and knowing exactly what I wanted, what I was. I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.

Mom gets an A in her history class at the community college. The leaves change. I get decent SAT scores and finish another draft of my college application essay. In English, there’s a lesson on Robert Frost, but the teacher makes no mention of sex. Maria and Wendy share a bagel at lunch, tearing pieces off with their fingers.

She tells me she’s sorry, but all I care about is Strane. As she apologizes, I try to type out questions, no longer caring that she can see my false starts, my scramble for words. She moves on to talking about college—how she’s headed to Brown, that she’s heard good things about Atlantica—but I don’t want to talk about college; I want to ask her about the length of his hair, if it’s overgrown and unkempt, if his clothes are frumpy—the only visible markers of his mental state I can think of, because I can’t expect her to tell me what I really want to know: Is he depressed? Does he miss me? I end up asking simply, Do you see him a lot?

So much time has passed, but it feels just like two years ago; I’m wearing the same clothes, look the same, or maybe I’ve gotten older and not realized it. Is there a chance he might not recognize me? I remember the shade of disappointment on his face when I turned sixteen. Practically a woman now.

“Happy birthday,” he says as he hands me a bottle. I don’t take it. “I know what you did,” I say, trying to hold on to the anger, but the words come out as squeaks. I’m a mouse already on the verge of tears. He touches his hand to my face to soothe me. I jerk away, and as I do I think of the line from Lolita, when Humbert finds Lo after so many years: “I’ll die if you touch me.”

Getting you away from Browick saved you from an investigation that might’ve wrecked you. Your name in the papers, a notoriety you have no control over following you like a pall. You wouldn’t have wanted that. You wouldn’t have survived it.” His eyes travel over me. “All this time, I assumed you understood why I did it. I even thought you’d forgiven me. Wishful thinking, I guess. I could’ve projected too much wisdom onto you. I know I did that at times.” Something cold trickles down my spine—embarrassment, shame. Maybe I’m being dense, simple-minded.

I don’t think that. That isn’t what I mean by justice. I just want to know he’s been miserable, a broken man like Jenny described. Because here, in front of me, he doesn’t look broken. He looks happy, the teaching award propped up on the bookcase.

The ceiling creaks as he walks down the hallway into his bedroom. He returns with two envelopes, one a letter addressed to me, dated July 2001. The first lines turn my stomach inside out: Vanessa, I wonder if you remember me, last November, moaning into your soft warm lap, “I’m going to ruin you”? My question for you now is, did I? Do you feel destroyed? There’s no safe way to get this to you, but guilt may make me willing to risk it. I need to know you’re ok. Inside the other envelope is a birthday card. He’s signed the inside Love, JS.