My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  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. In the meantime, apparently my only option was to wait. Like girls sitting in the bleachers at basketball games watching the boys play, or girls sitting on the couch watching boys play video games. Endless waiting.

  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.

  When I’m home over February break, I go to the grocery store with Mom and, as an experiment, stare at every single man, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones. Who knows how long it’s been since a girl last looked at them this way. I feel sorry for them, how desperate they must be, how lonely and sad. When the men notice me looking, they’re visibly confused, brows knit as they try to figure me out. Only a few recognize what I am, a hardness taking over their faces as they match my stare.

  Strane says he can’t go a week without hearing from me. So one night halfway through break, after my parents go to bed, I bring the cordless phone up to my room, stuff pillows along the bottom of my bedroom door to block out the sound. My stomach flips as I dial his number. When he answers with a groggy hello, I say nothing, suddenly mortified at the thought of him rolling over and answering the phone like an old person who goes to bed at ten.

  “Hello?” he says, impatience raising his voice. “Hello?”

  I relent. “It’s me.”

  He sighs and says my name, the s whistling through his teeth. He misses me. He wants me to tell him how my break has been, wants to know everything. I do my best to describe my days—walks with Babe, shopping trips into town, ice-skating as the afternoon sun sets on the frozen lake—while avoiding any mention of my parents, making it sound as though I do everything alone.

  “What are you doing now?” he asks.

  “I’m in my room.” I wait for him to ask another question, but he’s quiet. I wonder if he’s fallen back asleep. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About you,” he says. “And the time you were here in this bed. 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. If I shut my eyes, I feel the flannel sheets, the weight of the down duvet. His hand wrapped around my wrist, guiding it down.

  “What are you wearing?” he asks.

  My eyes dart to the door and I hold my breath, listening for any sounds from my parents’ bedroom. “Pajamas.”

  “Like the ones I bought you?”

  I say no, laugh at the thought of wearing something like those in front of my parents.

  “Tell me what they’re like,” he says.

  I look down at the pattern of dog faces, fire hydrants, and bones. “They’re stupid,” I say. “You wouldn’t like them.”

  “Take them off,” he says.

  “It’s too cold.” I keep my voice light, feign naïveté, but I know what he wants me to do.

  “Take them off.”

  He waits; I don’t move. When he asks, “Did you?” I lie and say yes.

  It goes on from there, him telling me what to do and me not doing any of it but letting him believe I am. 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.

  “Will you do something for me?” he asks. “I want you to say something. Just a few words. Will you do that? Will you say a few words for me?”

  I open my eyes. “Ok.”

  “Ok? Ok. Ok.” There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”

  For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone.

  “Go on,” he says. “I love you, Daddy.”

  I say nothing, eyes fixed on my bedroom door.

  “Just once.” His voice haggard and rough.

  I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain.

  I’m far away. I’m airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail. Now I fly out of the house, into the night, through the pines and across the frozen lake where the water moves and moans beneath the ice. He asks me to again say the words. I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans.

  His labored breathing stops and I land back in my bedroom. He’s finished; it’s over. I try to imagine how it works when he does that, if he comes into his hand, or a towel, or straight onto the sheets. How gross it is for men, having the giveaway of a mess at the end. The thought You’re fucking disgusting surges through me.

  Strane clears his throat. “Well, I better let you go,” he says.

  After he hangs up, I throw the phone and it breaks open, batteries rolling across the floor. I lie in bed for a long time, awake but unmoving, eyes fixed on the blue shadows, my mind full of nothing, glassy and still enough to skate on.

  Mom doesn’t tell me that she heard me talking on the phone until we’re driving back to Browick. When she says this, my hand grips the door handle, as though I might open it and hurl myself into the ditch.

  “It sounded like you were talking to a boy,” she says. “Were you?”

  I stare straight ahead. It was mostly Strane doing the talking, but she could have picked up and listened in. My parents don’t have a phone in their bedroom and I’d been using the only cordless. Maybe I hadn’t heard her go downstairs?

  “It’s fine if you were,” she adds. “And it’s fine if you have a boyfriend. You don’t need to keep it a secret.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  I study her out of the corner of my eye. I can’t tell if she’s telling the truth. Why does she think I was talking to a boy if she didn’t hear anything? My mind races alongside the car, trying to keep up. She must have heard something, but not enough to suspect anything unusual. If she heard Strane’s deep, unmistakably grown-man voice, she would have freaked out right then, stormed into my room and ripped the phone from my hands. She wouldn’t wait until we were alone in the car to bring it up so delicately.

  I let out a slow breath and loosen my grip on the door handle. “Don’t tell Dad.”

  “I won’t,” she says, her voice bright. She seems pleased, happy that I confided in her and shared my secret, or maybe she’s relieved at the idea of me having a boyfriend, being social, fitting in.

  “But I want you to tell me about him,” she says.

  She asks me his name, and for a second, I blank; I never call him by his first name. I could use a fake one, and probably should, but the temptation to say it out loud is too strong. “Jacob.”

  “Oh, I like that. Is he good-looking?”

  I shrug, unsure what to say.

  “That’s ok,” she says. “Looks aren’t everything. It’s more important that he’s nice to you.”

  “He’s nice to me.”

  “Good,” she says. “That’s the only t
hing I care about.”

  I lean against the headrest, close my eyes. It feels like getting an itch scratched, the relief of hearing her say that Strane being nice is the most important thing, more important than looks, and if treating me well is more important than looks, then it’s more important than the age difference, or his being my teacher.

  Mom starts asking more questions—what grade he’s in, where he’s from, what classes we have together—and my chest tightens; I shake my head and snap, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  We’re quiet for a mile and then she asks, “Are you having sex?”

  “Mom!”

  “If you are, you should be on the Pill. I’ll make you an appointment.” She stops, says quietly, more to herself than me, “No, you’re only fifteen. That’s too young.” She looks over, her brow furrowed. “You’re supervised there. It’s not like some kind of free-for-all.”

  I sit unmoving, unblinking, unsure if she really wants me to reassure her. Yes, we’re supervised. The teachers watch us very closely. It’s suddenly sickening, this conversation, the deception, treating it all like a game.

  Am I a monster? I wonder. I must be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to lie like this.

  “Should I make you an appointment?” she asks.

  I think of Strane pressing my hip, holding me down, his operation, a vasectomy. I shake my head no and Mom sighs in relief.

  “I just want you to be happy,” she says. “Happy and surrounded by people who are nice to you.”

  “I am,” I say. As the woods flash by, I venture further. “He tells me I’m perfect.”

  Mom presses her lips together, holding back a bigger smile. “First love is so special,” she says. “You’ll never forget it.”

  Strane is in a bad mood on the first day back, barely looking at me in class and ignoring my raised hand. We’re reading A Farewell to Arms, and when Hannah Levesque calls the novel boring, Strane snaps that Hemingway would probably find her boring as well. He threatens Tom Hudson with a dress code violation because Tom’s sweatshirt is unzipped, his Foo Fighters T-shirt on display. At the end of class, I try to take off with everyone else, for once having zero desire to linger. Before I reach the door, though, Strane calls my name. I stop and the other students move past me like a river current, Tom with his jaw set in anger, Hannah with her wounded expression, Jenny eyeing me as though she wants to say something, the words piled up behind her lips.

  When the classroom empties, Strane closes the door, turns off the lights, and leads me into the office, where the radiator is on full blast, the sea glass window fogged over. He leans on the table rather than sitting on the love seat beside me, which seems deliberate, like he’s sending a message. Switching on the electric kettle, he says nothing for the time it takes for the water to boil and to make himself a cup of tea; he doesn’t offer me one.

  When he finally speaks, his voice is clipped, professional. The mug of tea steaming in his hand, he says, “I know you’re upset over what I asked you to do during our phone call.” Except I’d practically forgotten about the phone call and what he’d asked me to say. Even when I try to recall it now, I can’t quite remember. My brain veers away from the memory, repelled by a force beyond my control.

  “I’m not upset,” I say.

  “Clearly you are.”

  I frown. This feels like a trick; he’s the one who’s upset, not me. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “Yes,” he says, “we do.”

  He does most of the talking, going on about how the break gave him time to think about all the ways in which I’m still a mystery to him. How he doesn’t really know me. He’s begun to wonder if he’s been projecting himself onto me, tricking himself into thinking there’s a connection between us when he’s really seeing a reflection of himself.

  “I even started to wonder if you enjoy making love, or if it’s just a performance you put on for my benefit.”

  “I enjoy it,” I say.

  He heaves a sigh. “I want to believe you. Truly, I do.”

  He keeps going, pacing the short length of the office. “I feel so strongly toward you,” he says. “Sometimes I worry I’ll drop dead from it. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt for any woman. It’s not even in the same universe of feeling.” He stops, looks at me. “Does it frighten you to hear a man like me talk this way about you?”

  A man like me. I shake my head.

  “How does it make you feel?”

  I look up at the ceiling as I try to come up with the right word. “Powerful?”

  After that he relaxes a bit, set at ease by the idea of him making me feel powerful. 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.” He laughs and crouches before me, squeezes my hands. “My god, imagine you at twenty.” He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear.

  “Is that how you felt?” I ask. “When you were . . .” I don’t say the rest of the sentence, when you were my age, because it sounds too much like something a kid would say, but he understands anyway.

  “No, but boys are different. 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.”

  Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. He’s like Humbert Humbert, assigning mythical significance to certain ages. I ask, “Don’t you mean nine to fourteen?” I mean it in a teasing way, figure he’ll understand the reference, but he looks at me like I’ve accused him of something horrible.

  “Nine?” He jerks his head back. “I would never. Jesus, not nine.”

  “It’s a joke,” I say. “You know, like in Lolita. The age nymphets are supposed to be?”

  “Is that what you think I am?” he asks. “A pedophile?”

  When I don’t answer, he stands, starts to pace again.

  “You take that book too literally. I’m not that character. That’s not what we are.”

  My cheeks burn at the criticism. It feels unfair; he’s the one who gave me the novel. What did he expect?

  “I am not attracted to children,” he continues. “I mean, look at you, your body. You’re nothing like a child.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”

  He stops, momentarily snapped out of his anger, and I feel the power shift slightly back to me. “Well, what you look like,” he says. “You’re . . .”

  “I’m what?” From the couch, I watch him fumble for words.

  “I just mean you’re fairly developed. More like a woman than not.”

  “So I’m fat.”

  “No. God, no. That’s not what I’m saying. Of course not. Look at me, I’m fat.” He smacks his stomach, tries to get me to laugh, and part of me wants to because I know that’s not what he’s saying, but it feels good to make him feel bad. He sits beside me, takes my face in his hands. “You’re perfect,” he says. “You’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect.”

  We’re quiet for a while, him gazing at me while I scowl up at the ceiling, not wanting to lose the upper hand so soon. I glance over at him and see a bead of sweat run down his cheek. I’m sweating, too—in my armpits, under my breasts.

  He stares straight into me. “The thing I asked you to say on the phone? It was a fantasy. I wouldn’t really do that. I wouldn’t be that.”

  I say nothing and turn my face back toward the ceiling.

  “Do you believe me?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  He reaches for me, pulls me onto his lap, wraps his arms around me and holds me so my face rests against his chest. Sometimes it’s easier to talk this way, when we’re not looking at each other.

  “I know I’m
a little dark,” he says. “I can’t help it. I’ve always been this way. It’s a lonely way to live, but I’d made peace with that loneliness until you came along.” He tugs on my hair. You. “When you started turning in those poems and chasing after me, at first I thought, ok, this girl has a crush. 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. He gave me books before I ever gave him poems. He was the one who said he wanted to kiss me good night, that my hair was the color of red maple leaves. That all happened before I even realized what was really going on. Then I think of him insisting that I’m the one in charge and that he doesn’t care about the nonexistent dalliances I’ve had before him. There are things he needs to believe in order to live with himself, and it would be cruel for me to label these as lies.

  “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.”

  He takes a handful of my hair and pulls my head back so he can see my face. His hold isn’t rough, but it isn’t soft, either.

  “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.” His voice shakes with feeling and his eyes are big and glassy, full of love. He studies my face and I know what he’s looking for—recognition, understanding, reassurance he’s not alone.

  I think of his knee pressing into me behind his desk, his hand stroking my leg. I didn’t care that he hadn’t asked if it was ok, or that he was my teacher, or that nine other people were in the room. As soon as it happened, I wanted it to happen again. A normal girl wouldn’t have reacted that way. There is something dark about me, something that’s always been there.