Before You Knew My Name (19)

We are about to fall when he breaks away and laughs, a sudden, awkward sound that bounces off the walls and puts a distance between us.

‘Jesus. What a cliché I’ve become.’

I don’t know if he’s talking about the snow, or the kiss, or the fact he used to be my teacher, and I am a young woman, his muse. I cast my mind about, trying to find something clever to say, to show him I take responsibility for the kiss, for what it means, but I need more time to make sense of what I am feeling. All I know in this moment is that he should kiss me again, before something is lost. I don’t have the words to say why.

‘It’s okay. I want this.’

This is all that comes out, a kind of plea. I do not want to stay on this precipice any longer.

He sways, glistens, and begins to undress me.

‘Fuck.’

Hands on my breasts, then his mouth. One suck of each nipple, a brand new sensation felt deep in my belly. And then he is kneeling, his mouth moving from thigh to thigh, before his tongue pushes inside me. I don’t move.

‘Alice.’

Two fingers now, his tongue finding nerve. I see a match lit behind my eyes. Still, I don’t move.

‘Alice. You are so goddamn beautiful.’

Harder now. Deeper. His fingers spark, I feel like fire. It’s okay. I want this.

‘Alice.’

He keeps saying my name, only it sounds like someone else’s name now. Some other girl he first saw when she was sixteen years old and he was closer to forty. After her mother had died, leaving her alone and sad, and before he looked at her the way he does now.

‘Please, Mr Jackson,’ I say over his head, because I know I am not going to take that two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the stack still sitting there on the table. And because I don’t want to be alone and sad anymore. I want him to help me forget my pain, dissolve it. And it does rise to the surface, scatter across my skin, as he enters me slowly, saying my name over and over, the sky now black outside, and me swirling, like snow.



He tells me I’m like the sky. That storm clouds pass across my face, and just as quickly it’s clear skies, bright and shining. He says that’s what he’s trying to capture when he draws me, or takes those pictures, but he can’t keep his hands away long enough now, and there is always another way for us to touch that gets in the way of the art. I’m getting quite good at it, too. I know where to place my hands, and my mouth. He’s teaching me what to do, how to move my hips, what to say. I even let him film me sometimes, so that it’s me with the glazed eyes, twisting and moaning like the women in those videos he showed me a lifetime ago.

‘How many were there before me?’ he asked, that first, next morning.

‘Um. Three.’

I buried my face in his shoulder. Embarrassed. He had taught two of the boys at the high school.

‘How old were you the first time, Alice?’

‘Fifteen.’

Fifteen. My mother had committed suicide just months before and a boy wanted to say sorry. He was careful and clumsy, and it was over in a minute. ‘Sorry,’ he actually said, right at the end, and I was never sure for what, exactly. I felt nothing, did nothing. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t even bad. It was just nothing, because I couldn’t feel anything at all back then.

Two and three were about trying to feel something, trying to feel anything at all. Wanting to be like the other girls in my class. Like Tammy, who told me what it was like to come—‘Like your body is a firework!’ That’s what I wanted, to feel like I was exploding, disintegrating, and that’s not what it was like at all. With two and three, I felt heavy, stuck.

‘They weren’t … it wasn’t … very good.’

But Mr Jackson wasn’t listening. You can tell by someone’s eyes when they’re not listening, and his had taken on that familiar sheen.

‘Fifteen? God, I’m a pervert for saying this, but that turns me on. See …’

And he placed my hand on him, moved it up and down.

‘Did you do this?’

I shook my head, no.

‘Did you do this?’

He pushed my head down.

‘Did you do this?’

Sliding himself in and out of my mouth, watching me, smiling when I shook my head again. No.

‘Alice.’

His invocation. My name as a kind of summoning. No, Mr Jackson, I did not do any of this. I would not have known how. In fact, I barely recognise the girl I’ve become.

It’s as if he has dismantled my life and put me back together a whole different way.



The first time I come, it doesn’t feel like fireworks. It feels like breaking into a run. That moment when muscles coil, and suddenly it’s as if there is a hand at your back, propelling you forward. You go from heavy to light in an instant, you’re sprinting, feet barely touching the ground. Everything rushes by and it’s you right there at the centre, flying.

That’s what it feels like.

And then you come crashing back to earth, heavy limbs and hard breath. Everything slows to its usual, unbearable pace, and the loss of that lightness is as painful as a punch. You were free, you were running. And now you are back here on the ground.

I never let Mr Jackson see how sad this loss makes me. How it makes me cry. Every single time.