“I’d prefer to have your permission,” she says again, “but I have an obligation to write the best article I possibly can. We can work together on this, ok? You tell me what you’re comfortable with and we’ll start from there. Would you be willing to do that, Vanessa?”
Words pile up in my mouth—stop calling me, stop emailing me, and stop saying my name as though you know me—but I can’t be biting, not now that she’s seen the blog with its posts telling our story in my own words.
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know. I need to think about it.”
Janine exhales a rush of breath against my ear. “Vanessa, I really hope you do. We owe it to each other to do whatever we can. We’re all in this together.”
I glare across the lobby and force myself to agree. “Sure, absolutely, you’re so right.”
“Trust me, I know how hard this is.” Janine lowers her voice. “I’m a survivor, too.”
That word, with its cloying empathy; that patronizing, flattening word that makes my whole body cringe no matter the context—it pushes too far. My lips curl up over my teeth as I spit out, “You don’t know anything about me,” and I hang up the phone, bolt across the lobby to the empty staff bathroom, and throw up into a toilet, curling my arms around the bowl until the wave passes, my stomach empties out, and I’m coughing up bile.
I’m still catching my breath on the floor and checking my blazer for vomit when the bathroom door opens and I hear my name. Inez.
“Vanessa? Are you ok?”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yup, I’m fine,” I say. “Just a stomach thing.”
The door closes, then opens again.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“I’m fine.”
“Because I could cover for—”
“Would you just give me some fucking space?” I press my cheek against the metal stall as her footsteps hurry away, back to the desk where, for the rest of the shift, her glassy eyes threaten to cry.
A few years ago, I saw Taylor’s face staring at me from a light pole while I waited to cross Congress Street. It was a flyer, an advertisement for a poetry reading at a bar. I knew she wrote poems and published some. I read everything I could get my hands on, ordering copies of the journals, routinely checking her seldom-updated website. I looked for traces of Strane in her writing, but all I found in the poems were quiet images of luna moths in incandescent light, a six-stanza meditation on her uterus. 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’ve never understood anything about her, no matter how hard I try. A few years ago I figured out where she worked, the neighborhood she lived in. Based on an Instagram of the view from her kitchen window, I figured out her exact building. I never stalked her, not exactly; the closest I ever let myself get was walking by her work, passing the building around lunchtime, checking each coming and going blond head. But when wasn’t I checking for her, scanning faces in restaurants and coffee shops, supermarkets and corner stores? I imagined her sometimes behind me as I walked the city. The thought of her watching made my body buzz, the same feeling I’d get when I imagined Strane’s eyes on me.
When I went to her reading, I stood at the back of the dimly lit bar, my red hair tucked up and hidden under a beanie. 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. She looked ordinary, happy, untouched. That night, I dug through old folders, found marked-up college essays, poems from high school. A paper I wrote on the role of rape in Titus Andronicus with Henry Plough’s comments at the end: Vanessa, your writing is astounding. I remember scoffing at the grade, knowing it was nothing to take seriously, only another round of praise from a teacher who wanted to coax me closer. But maybe he meant it. And maybe Strane—with all his compliments, his insistence that the way I saw the world was extraordinary—meant it, too. For all his faults, he was a good teacher, trained in spotting potential.
I search Twitter for Strane’s name and mostly find Taylor’s, a mix of feminist defenses and sexist attacks. One tweet includes a photo of her at fourteen, skinny and smiling through braces in her field hockey uniform, the text screaming, THIS IS HOW OLD TAYLOR BIRCH WAS WHEN JACOB STRANE ASSAULTED HER. I try to imagine the same line paired with the Polaroids Strane took of me at fifteen, my heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, or with the photos I took of myself at seventeen, standing before a backdrop of birch trees, lifting my skirt as I stared at the camera, 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.
2002
Senior year starts, and within the first week, I show up at the counselor’s office with my college applications filled out and a draft of an entrance essay I worked on all summer. I kept the list of schools Strane wrote for me, but the guidance counselor has me expand the list. I need safeties, she says. Why don’t we take a look at some state schools?
The strip mall diner closed over the summer, so I eat in the cafeteria, sitting with Wendy and Maria, girls from my English class. Maria is on exchange from Chile and lives with Wendy’s family. They’re exactly the kind of girls my parents want me to be friends with—studious, sweet, no boyfriends. At lunch, we eat low-fat yogurt and apple slices with two measured tablespoons of peanut butter while we quiz each other with flash cards, compare homework, and obsess over college applications. Wendy is hoping for University of Vermont, and Maria wants to stay in the States for college, too. Her dream is anywhere in Boston.
Life goes on and on. I get my license but no car. Babe comes home with porcupine quills all over her muzzle, and Mom and I have to hold her down while Dad pulls out each one with needle-nose pliers. Dad is elected union rep at the hospital. 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. A boy in my physics class asks me to the water semiformal and I say yes out of curiosity, but he has oniony breath and the thought of him touching me makes me want to die. In the dark auditorium, when the boy leans in to kiss me during a slow dance, I blurt out that I have a boyfriend.
“Since when?” he asks, eyebrows cocked.
Since always, I think. You don’t know anything about me.
“He’s older,” I say. “You wouldn’t know him. Sorry, I should’ve told you sooner.”
For the rest of the dance, the boy doesn’t speak to me, and at the end of the night, he says he can’t drive me home, that I live too far and he’s too tired. I have to call Dad to pick me up, and on the ride home he asks what went wrong, what happened, did the boy try something, did he hurt me? I say, “Nothing happened. It was nothing,” all the while hoping he doesn’t realize how familiar our words are, his questions and my denial.
After a series of thin envelopes from colleges, half-hearted waitlists and outright rejections, in March a fat envelope from Atlantica College, a school the guidance counselor convinced me to add. I tear into it, my parents watching with proud smiles. Congratulations, we are delighted. Brochures and forms pour out asking if I want to live on campus, do I have a dorm preference, and which meal plan do I want? There’s an invitation to an accepted student day and a handwritten note from my future advisor, a poetry professor with half a dozen published collections. Your poems are extraordinary, she writes. I’m so looking forward to working with you. My hands shake as I flip through everything. Even though Atlantica is technically a state school and not prestigious, getting accepted still feels so much like Browick, I’m thrown back in time.
That night, after my parents go
to bed, I grab the cordless phone and step outside onto the snowy yard, the moon illuminating the frozen lake.
It’s no surprise that Strane doesn’t answer. When the answering machine kicks in, I want to hang up and try again. Maybe if I keep calling, he’ll pick up out of pure exasperation. Even if he screams at me to leave him alone, at least I’ll get to hear his voice. I imagine him watching the caller ID, the flashing wye, phil & jan. There’s no way for him to know it’s not my parents calling to tell him they know everything and are going to make him pay, send him to prison. I hope he’s terrified, even if only for a moment. I love him, but when I think of that photo of him accepting the award in New York, the Association of New England Boarding Schools recognizing Jacob Strane as a distinguished teacher of the year, I want to hurt him.
His recorded voice speaks—“You’ve reached Jacob Strane . . .”—and I see him standing in his living room: his bare feet and T-shirt, his belly sloping over his underwear, his eyes on the machine. The beep pierces my ear and I stare across the lake, the long mountain purple against the blue-black sky.
“It’s me,” I say. “I know you can’t talk to me, but I wanted to tell you I got into Atlantica College. Starting on August twenty-first, that’s where I’ll be. And I’ll be eighteen then, so . . .”
I pause and hear the answering machine tape roll. I imagine it playing as evidence in a courtroom, Strane seated behind a table next to a lawyer, his head hanging in shame.
“I hope you’re waiting for me,” I say, “because I’m waiting for you.”
The weather warms and everything feels easier with the Atlantica acceptance in my pocket. It’s a sweetener for the bitterness of exile, a light at the end of this tunnel of shit. Despite the warnings teachers give that college acceptances can hypothetically be revoked, my grades fall to bare-effort Bs and Cs. Once or twice a week, I blow off afternoon classes to walk through the woods between the high school and the interstate, mud seeping into my sneakers as I watch the cars through the bare trees and smoke the cigarettes I pay a boy in my math class to buy for me. One afternoon, I see a deer dart out into the road and five cars, one after another, pile into a wreck. It takes just seconds for it to happen.
April, two days before my birthday, an alert pops up when I’m checking my email: jenny9876 has sent you a chat request—do you accept? I click “yes” so hard the mouse slips out from under my hand.
jenny9876: Hey Vanessa. It’s Jenny.
jenny9876: Hello?
jenny9876: Please answer if you’re there.
I watch the messages pop up, the line of text at the bottom of the chat window flashing jenny9876 is typing . . . jenny9876 is typing. Then it stops. I try to picture her—the line of her neck, gleaming brown hair. It’s April break at Browick; she must be at home in Boston. My fingers hover over the keyboard, but I don’t want to start typing until I’m ready, don’t want to let her see me start and stop and start again, a giveaway that I’m struggling.
dark_vanessa: what
jenny9876: Hey!
jenny9876: I’m so glad you’re there
jenny9876: How are you?
dark_vanessa: why are you messaging me?
She says she knows I must hate her because of what happened at Browick. That it’s been a long time and maybe I don’t even care anymore, but she still feels guilty. With graduation approaching, she’s been thinking about me a lot. How I’m not there and he still is—the unfairness of that.
jenny9876: I want you to know when I went to Mrs. Giles, I didn’t know what was going to happen.
jenny9876: This might sound naive, but I really thought he was going to get fired.
jenny9876: I only did what I did because I was so worried about you.
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? and her hate for him launches forth, palpable through the screen.
jenny9876: Yeah, I see him. I wish I didn’t. I can’t stand him. He walks around campus looking like a broken man but he has no reason to. You’re the one who suffered.
dark_vanessa: what do you mean? like he looks sad?
jenny9876: Miserable. Which is pretty ridiculous considering how he threw you under the bus.
dark_vanessa: what do you mean?
jenny9876 is typing . . . jenny9876 is typing . . .
jenny9876: Maybe you don’t know.
dark_vanessa: know what?
jenny9876: That he was the one who got you kicked out. He pressured Mrs. Giles into doing it.
jenny9876: I probably shouldn’t be talking about this.
jenny9876: I’m not even really supposed to know.
dark_vanessa: ???
jenny9876 is typing . . . jenny9876 is typing . . .
jenny9876: Ok so last year, me and some other people started a new club called Students for Social Justice, and one of the big things we wanted to work on was getting Browick to have an actual sexual harassment policy because they didn’t have one on record at all (which is really irresponsible and technically illegal). And so last winter, I met with Mrs. Giles about it because the administration wouldn’t do anything to help us, and when I met with her, I sort of used you as an example of a situation we wanted to prevent from happening again.
jenny9876: Because even though there was that meeting where you had to take responsibility for everything, everyone knows what really happened. They know you were victimized by him.
jenny9876: Anyway, when I met with Mrs. Giles she said I had it wrong, that you hadn’t been mistreated and that the school did nothing wrong. She showed me a couple of memos Strane had written about you and in them he pretty much claimed you made everything up.
jenny9876: Which is so frustrating because I know you didn’t. I don’t know exactly what happened between you two but I saw him grab you.
dark_vanessa: memos?
jenny9876: Yeah. There were two. One was about how you had destroyed his reputation and that Browick was no place for liars. I remember he called you “a bright but emotionally troubled girl.” He said you had violated the school code of ethics and should be expelled for it.
jenny9876: The other memo was from earlier. Maybe January 2001? It was about you having a crush on him and hanging around his classroom. There was something about him wanting a paper trail in case your behavior got out of hand. It seemed like something he wrote to cover his tracks in case he got caught.
After that, my brain launches off into the air, into the woods, needing the distance to understand. January 2001. When he and I were driving through the flashing yellow streetlights to his house, when he was giving me the strawberry pajamas—he lied to the school about me then. I was delirious, not yet able to grasp what was happening; he was strategizing and looking ten steps ahead. At the end, when it fell apart and he convinced me to stand in front of that room of people and call myself a liar, what was it that he said? “Vanessa, they decided you have to leave and there’s no changing their minds. It’s done.” I thought “they” meant Mrs. Giles, the administration, the institution of Browick itself. I thought it was him and me against them.
Before she signs off, Jenny asks me what really happened. Hands shaky, I start to type out, he used me then threw me away, then think better and delete it, the specter of firing and police and Strane thrown in prison still too frightening.
dark_vanessa: nothing happened
* * *
The day after my birthday, I tell my parents I have to go to the library in town for
a school project that doesn’t exist. It’s the first time I’ve ever asked to take the car on my own. They’re in the yard, cleaning the garden before planting annuals, their arms filthy with dirt up to their elbows. Mom hesitates, but Dad waves his hand. Go ahead.
“You’ve got to go out on your own sometime,” he says.
When I’m halfway to the car, keys in hand, Mom calls to me. My heart skips, half hoping she’ll tell me to stop.
“Will you buy some milk while you’re out?” she asks.
As I drive, the logic I constructed while in exile bows under this new weight and threatens to collapse. I’m not sure what, other than desperation, made me believe he wanted to get in touch and was waiting until I turned eighteen. He made no explicit promise, not even during the last conversation we had. He assured me that everything would be ok, and I took “ok” to mean one thing, but who knows what it meant to him. “Ok” could simply mean unscathed, unfired, and unjailed. My hands grow slick on the steering wheel. How easy it is to be tricked into building a narrative out of air, out of nothing.
Once in town, I turn onto the small highway heading west to Norumbega, trying to work through my memories to find anything real. The times I told people at school that I had a secret older boyfriend—my body cringes when I think of it. I knew it wasn’t entirely true, but it felt true enough to lie about. He was waiting for me, even if the boyfriend label didn’t really fit. The whole time, I’d been discarded, unwanted. Maybe he’s moved on completely, is in love and having sex with someone else, a woman, a student.
My brain shorts out at the thought—a flash of bright light and pain. The car swerves into the soft shoulder, then back onto the road.
Norumbega is unchanged: the tree-lined river, the bookstore, the head shop, the pizza place, the bakery, Browick’s hilltop campus glinting above downtown. I park in his driveway, behind the station wagon. The same one we drove from campus to his house, then later through the down east woods, his free hand resting between my legs. 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. Maybe I’ve been hardened and aged. I feel tough, or at least tougher than I was. But why? I haven’t actually been through anything. I saw a car crash through the trees, talked to some men online, came close to being kidnapped by a loser with a gun collection, ate a lot of pie in a diner by myself. Maybe that all adds up to a kind of wisdom. I wonder whether I’d even fall for it if he were my teacher now.
My Dark Vanessa Page 24
