I exhale loudly, relieved. “So what exactly did he do to you?”
“He abused me.”
“But . . .” I look around the coffee shop, as though the people sitting at other tables might be able to help. “What does that mean? Did he kiss you, or . . .”
“I don’t want to focus on the details,” Taylor says. “It’s not helpful.”
“Helpful?”
“To the cause.”
“What cause?”
She tilts her head and squints, the same look Strane used to give me when I was floundering. For a moment, I think she’s again doing an impression of him. “The cause of holding him accountable.”
“But he’s dead. What do you want to do to him, drag his body through the streets?”
Her eyes widen.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That came out wrong.”
She closes her eyes and inhales, holds the breath, and then lets it go. “It’s fine. This is hard to talk about. We’re both doing the best we can.”
She starts to talk about the article, how the goal of it is to bring to light all the ways the system failed us. “They all knew,” she says, “and they did nothing to stop him.” I assume she means Browick, the administration, but don’t ask questions. She talks so fast; it’s hard to keep up. Another goal of the article, she says, is to connect with other survivors.
“You mean in general?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Survivors of him.”
“There are others?”
“There has to be. I mean, he taught for thirty years.” She cups her hands around her empty mug, purses her lips. “So I know you said you don’t want to be in the article.” I open my mouth, but she continues. “You can be completely anonymous. No one would know it’s you. I know it’s scary, but think of the good it would do. Vanessa, what you went through . . .” She ducks her head, looks straight at me. “It’s the kind of story that has the power to change the way people think.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“I know it’s scary,” she says again. “The idea terrified me at first.”
“No,” I say, “it’s not that.”
She waits for me to explain, her eyes darting.
“I don’t consider myself to have been abused,” I say. “Definitely not the way you all do.”
Her pale eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You don’t think you were abused?”
The air seems sucked out of the coffee shop, noises amplified, colors muted. “I don’t think of myself as a victim,” I say. “I knew what I was getting into. I wanted it.”
“You were fifteen.”
“Even at fifteen.”
I go on, justifying myself, words spilling out of me, the same old lines. He and I were two dark people who craved the same things; our relationship was terrible but never abusive. The more alarmed Taylor’s expression becomes, the more I dig in. When I say what he and I had was the kind of thing great love stories are made of, she holds her hand up to her mouth, like she’s about to be sick.
“And if I’m being totally honest,” I say, “I think what you and this journalist are doing is pretty fucked up.”
Her face scrunches in disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“It seems dishonest. There are things you say about him that don’t line up with what I know was true.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think you’re making him out to be something worse than he was.”
“How can you say that when you know what he did to me?”
“But I don’t know what he did to you,” I say. “You won’t tell me.”
Her eyes flutter shut. She presses her palms on the table, as though calming herself down. Slowly, she says, “You know he was a pedophile.”
“No,” I say, “he wasn’t.”
“You were fifteen,” she says. “I was fourteen.”
“That’s not pedophilia,” I say. She stares at me agog. I clear my throat and say, carefully, “The more correct term is ephebophile.”
And with that, the wire connecting her and me goes slack. She holds up her hands as though to say, I’m done. She says she needs to go back to work, won’t look at me as she gathers her empty coffee cup and phone.
I follow her out of the shop, tripping a little over the doorway. I have a sudden urge to reach out, to grab her braid and not let go. Outside, the sidewalk is empty save for a man with his hands shoved in his coat pockets and eyes fixed on the ground, whistling one steady single note as he walks toward us. Taylor watches the man, her face so furious I think she’s going to snap at him to shut up, but as he passes by, she whirls around, jabs her finger at me.
“I used to think about you all the time back when he was abusing me,” she says. “I thought you were the only person who could understand what I was going through. I thought . . .” She takes a breath, lets her arm drop. “Who cares what I thought. I was wrong, obviously wrong.” She starts to walk off, stops, and adds, “I received death threats after I came forward. Did you know that? People posted my address online and said they were going to rape and murder me.”
“Yes,” I say, “I know that.”
“It’s selfish to watch the rest of us not be believed and do nothing to help. If you came forward, no one would be able to ignore you. They’d have to believe you and then they’d believe us, too.”
“But I don’t understand what that would give you. He’s dead. He’s not going to apologize. He’ll never admit he did anything wrong.”
“It’s not about him,” she says. “If you came forward, Browick would have to admit that it happened. They’d be held responsible. It could change how that school is run.”
She looks at me expectantly. I lift my shoulders and she huffs a frustrated sigh.
“I feel sorry for you,” she says.
As she starts to walk away, I reach out. My fingers brush her back. “Tell me what he did to you,” I say. “Don’t say he abused you. Tell me what happened.”
She turns, her eyes wild.
“Did he kiss you? Did he bring you into his office?”
“Office?” she repeats, and I close my eyes, relieved at her confusion. “Why does it matter so much to you?” she asks.
I open my mouth, the word because poised to come out—because—because whatever happened to you couldn’t have been so bad, because it’s ridiculous for you to demand so much when I’m the one who bore the brunt of him. I’m the one marked for life.
“He groped me, ok?” she says. “In the classroom, behind his desk.”
I breathe out and turn limp, swaying as I stand. Like Strane under the spruce tree at the Halloween dance. You know what I want to do to you? At that point, he’d only touched me—groped behind his desk.
“But he violated me in other ways,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be physical to be abuse.”
“What about the other girls?” I ask.
“He groped them, too.”
“That’s all he did?”
She scoffs, “Yeah, I guess that’s all.”
So he touched them. It was what he’d confessed to me all along, starting that night at his house, when he held my face in his hands and said, I touched her. That’s all. I was relieved then. I wait now for the relief to find me again but there’s nothing, not even outrage or shock. Because by hearing her say it, nothing is changed. I already knew.
“I know how different it was with you,” she says. “But it started the same way, right? Calling you up to his desk. You wrote about it on your blog. I remember when I first found it. Reading it was like reading myself.”
“You read it back then?”
She nods. “I found it bookmarked on his computer. I used to leave you anonymous comments sometimes. I was too scared to use my name.”
I say I had no idea—about the comments, her reading.
“Well, what did you know?” she asks. “Did you really not know about me?” She’s already asked the question and I’ve already answered, but it means something dif
ferent now. She’s asking if I knew what he did to her.
I tell the truth. “I knew,” I say. “I knew about you.” He told me but called her nothing and I didn’t argue. I forgave him, and I offered forgiveness for something so much worse, something he hadn’t even done. What was a hand on the leg compared to what he’d done to me? I didn’t think it mattered, and even now, with her standing before me, it’s hard to understand the damage it could have caused. Was it really that bad, what he did to you? Was it worth all this?
“It might seem small to you,” she says. “But it was enough to wreck me.”
She leaves me standing in the middle of the sidewalk, her braid bouncing against her back as she strides away. I walk home through the square, the giant Christmas tree being strung with lights, the high school kids on their lunch period loitering around, boys with their hoods up and groups of teenage girls in jean jackets and scuffed sneakers. Their chipped nail polish and ponytails and laughter and—I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly I see sparks and stars. 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.
In Ruby’s office, I ask, “Do you think I’m selfish?”
It’s late, not our normal day or session time. I’d texted her, I’m having an emergency, something she has always told me I could do but I never imagined I’d need it.
“I think there are ways forward that don’t require stripping yourself bare,” Ruby says. “Better ways.”
From her armchair, she watches me and waits, her endless patience. Out the window, the sky is a range of blue, azure to cobalt to midnight. I tip my head back so my hair falls away from my face, and to the ceiling I say, “You didn’t answer the question.”
“No, I don’t think you’re selfish.”
I straighten my head. “You should. I’ve known this whole time what he did to that girl. Eleven years ago, he told me he touched her. He didn’t lie. He didn’t hide it from me. I just didn’t care.”
Her expression doesn’t change; only her fluttering lashes show I’ve affected her.
“I knew about the other girls, too,” I say. “I knew he was touching them. For years he would call me late at night and we’d—we’d talk about the things we did when I was younger. Sex stuff. But he’d talk about other girls, too, ones in his classes. He’d describe calling them up to his desk. He was telling me what he was doing. And I didn’t care.”
Ruby’s face is still unflinching.
“I could have made him stop,” I say. “I knew he couldn’t control himself. If I’d left him alone, he probably would have been able to stop. I forced him to relive it when he didn’t want to.”
“What he did to you or to anyone else wasn’t your fault.”
“But I knew he was weak. Remember? You said that yourself. And you’re right, I did know. He told me he couldn’t be around me because I brought out darkness in him, but I wouldn’t leave him alone.”
“Vanessa, listen to yourself.”
“I could have stopped him.”
“Ok,” she says, “even if you could have stopped him, it wasn’t your responsibility and it wouldn’t have changed anything for you. Because stopping him wouldn’t have changed the fact that you were abused.”
“I wasn’t abused.”
“Vanessa—”
“No, listen to me. Don’t act like I don’t know what I’m saying. He never forced me, ok? He made sure I said yes to everything, especially when I was younger. He was careful. He was good. He loved me.” I say that over and over, a refrain that turns meaningless so quickly. He loved me, he loved me.
I hold my head in my hands and Ruby tells me to breathe. I hear Strane’s voice instead of hers, telling me to take deep breaths so he can get farther inside. That’s nice, he said. That’s so nice.
“I’m so fucking tired of this,” I whisper.
Ruby’s crouching on the floor in front of me, her hands on my shoulders, the first time she’s ever touched me. “What are you tired of?” she asks.
“Hearing him, seeing him, everything I do being laced with him.”
We’re quiet. My breathing steadies and she stands, her hands dropping away from me.
Gently, she says, “If you think back to the first incident—”
“No, I can’t.” I throw my head against the back of the chair, press myself into the cushion. “I can’t go back there.”
“You don’t have to go back,” she says. “You can stay in the room. Just think of one moment, the first one between the two of you that could be considered intimate. When you look back on that first memory, who was the initiator, you or him?”
She waits, but I can’t say it. Him. He called me up to his desk and touched me while the rest of the class did their homework. I sat beside him, stared out the window, and let him do what he wanted. And I didn’t understand it, didn’t ask for it.
I exhale, hang my head. “I can’t.”
“That’s fine,” she says. “Take it slow.”
“I just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my thighs. “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?”
I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy.
“It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.
2007
Spring semester I start drinking again, a crowd of empty bottles on my nightstand. If I’m not in class, I’m in bed with my laptop, the fan whirring and screen glowing late into the night. I scroll through photos of Britney Spears in the midst of a breakdown, shaving her head, attacking paparazzi with an umbrella and caged-animal eyes. Gossip blogs post the same pictures over and over with headlines like “Former Teen Pop Princess Goes Off the Deep End!,” followed by pages of gleeful comments: What a train wreck! . . . So sad how they always end up like this . . . I bet she’ll be dead by the end of the month.
At night, I keep my phone on the windowsill next to my bed, and in the morning, the first thing I do is check to see how many times Strane has called. When I’m out at the bar with Bridget and feel my phone vibrate, I dig it out of my bag and hold it up so she can see his flashing name. “I feel bad,” I say, “but I just can’t talk to him.” I’ve told her about the investigation, called it a “witch hunt” as Strane did, made it clear that he didn’t really do anything bad, but that I’m still angry. Don’t I have the right to be mad? “Of course you do,” Bridget says.
I start checking Taylor Birch’s Facebook profile every day, clicking through her public photos, both disgusted and pleased at how ordinary she appears with her braces and stringy white blond hair. Only one photo gives me pause: her grinning in a field hockey uniform, kilt ending halfway down her tanned thighs, browick in maroon lettering across her flat chest. But then I remember Strane describing my fifteen-year-old body, how he called it fairly developed, more woman than not. I think of Ms. Thompson, her womanly body. I shouldn’t be so eager to turn him into a monster.
I don’t need the credits, but I take Henry’s gothic seminar anyway. In class, he turns to me when the other students drag their feet through discussions. A silence falls over the room and his eyes skim the rest of them, landing always on me. “Vanessa?” he prompts. “Your thoughts?” He relies on me to always have something to say about the stories of obsessive women and monstrous men.
After every class, there’s some pretense for me to follow him
into his office—he has a book he wants to lend me, he nominated me for a departmental award, he wants to talk to me about an assistant job that’s available next year, something for me to do while I work on grad school applications—but once we’re alone, it devolves into talking, laughing. Laughing! I laugh more with him than I ever have with Strane, who I’m still ignoring, whose phone calls have started coming every night, voicemails asking me to please, please call him, but I don’t want to hear how he’s hanging by a thread. I want Henry, to sit in his office and point to a postcard tacked to the wall, the only thing he’s hung up, and ask for the story behind it and have him tell me it’s from Germany, that he went to a conference there and lost his luggage and had to wander around in sweatpants. I want to hear him call me funny, charming, brilliant, the best student he’s ever had; for him to describe what he sees in store for me. “When you’re in graduate school,” he says, “you’ll be one of those hip teaching assistants, the kind who holds her office hours in a coffee shop.” It’s a small thing but enough for my breath to catch. I can see myself at the head of my own classroom, telling my own students what to read and write. Maybe that’s what this has always been about—not wanting these men but wanting to be them.
In my blog, I document everything he says to me, every look, every grin. Fixated on the question of what it means, I tally it all up as though this will give me an answer. We eat lunch together in the student union, he responds to my emails at one in the morning, matching me joke for joke and signing his name “Henry,” while emails to the whole class are “H. Plough.” On my blog, I type it might mean nothing but it should mean something over and over until the lines fill the whole screen. He tells me about having memorized “Jabberwocky” for fun when he was ten years old, and I see him as a boy the way I never could with Strane. But that’s what he is, boyish, at least, if not an outright boy, grinning when I tease him, that flush taking over his face. He references Simpsons episodes in his emails, mentions some song popular in his grad school days. “You don’t know Belle and Sebastian?” he asks, surprised. He makes me a CD and as I scour the lyrics for clues, the version of me that lives in his mind reveals herself.
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