My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

When Strane and I met, I was fifteen and he was forty-two, a near perfect thirty years between us. That’s how I described the difference back then—perfect. I loved the math of it, three times my age, 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.

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.

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. Like the laws that flatten all the sex I had with Strane before I turned eighteen into legal rape—are we supposed to believe that birthday is magic? It’s as arbitrary a marker as any. Doesn’t it make sense that some girls are ready sooner?

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.

Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.

With one swipe of my hand, I erase the notes and write BITCH in big bold letters that take up the whole board.

Mr. Strane passes out copies of another Frost poem, “Putting in the Seed,” and tells us to read this one silently to ourselves, and after we finish doing that, he tells us to do it again. “But this time, as you read it,” he says, “I want you to think about sex.”

Wooooow

“I’m saying that it deserves to be read closely and with an open mind,” Mr. Strane says. “And let’s be honest here, I’m not asking any of you to think about something you don’t already spend a significant amount of time contemplating. Now get to it.” He claps his hands to signal we should start.

While wind rattles the windowpane, I turn the pages and feel a slow burn within me, hot coals, deep red embers. It isn’t only the plot, its story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her. It’s that he gave it to me. There’s now a whole new context to what we’re doing, new insight into what he might want from me.

“Such a dirty mind / I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind.”

What if I’d been offended, told on him? Maybe all along he’s been the brave one and I’ve been selfish.

Shes a child!

At the very least, I need to meet him in the middle, show him what I want and that I’m willing to let the world demonize me, too.

don’t know isn’t a good answer. It’s what a child would say, not someone willing and capable of making up her own mind.

doesn’t matter that my skin crawls from touching him. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this.

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

Does he really believe he’d ever go to prison, a Harvard-educated, well-spoken white man? The fear feels unfounded and vaguely performative, but maybe it’s cruel to criticize.

The same thing he did when I was twenty-two, when I was sixteen.

The school that once promised to nurture and protect me has sided with an abuser today. I’m disappointed but not surprised.

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 never would have done it if you weren’t so willing, he’d said. It sounds like delusion.

Driven toward it, toward him, I was the kind of girl that isn’t supposed to exist: one eager to hurl herself into the path of a pedophile.

Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight

years old going on thirty.

I’m not sure I was ever really a...

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.

Jesse saying I’m an idiot reminds me of Strane calling me a dark romantic—both seem to point to an inclination toward bad decision-making. The other day Strane referred to me as a “depressive,” and I looked up the word: a person with a tendency toward melancholy.

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.

As teenagers, they’re inconsequential. They don’t become real people until adulthood. Girls become real so early. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. That’s when your minds turn on. It’s a gorgeous thing to witness.”

“Think of the way you reacted when I first touched you,” he says. “Any of those other girls in your class would have been horrified by me doing that, but not you.”

It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.

men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.

“Longtime Boarding School Teacher Suspended Amid Further Allegations of Sexual Abuse.” Five girls accusing him now, it says.

“I don’t know how I’m going to handle being away from you this summer,” I say. I don’t even know if I mean it.

I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.

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. If I were smart, I’d burn everything, especially the photos,

All interesting women had older lovers when they were young. It’s a rite of passage. You go in a girl and come out not quite a woman but closer, a girl more conscious of herself and her own power.

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

It makes me think of the only part of Lolita I truly hate, the passage where Humbert imagines first having daughters with Lo, then making granddaughters with those daughters. It makes me remember, too, the thing I’ve almost forgotten—him asking me to call him Daddy on the phone while he jerked off on the other end.

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.

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.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me. There’s nothing to forgive. I’m sharing this because I want you to understand that I’m still living with the consequences of loving you.”