My Dark Vanessa(37)
At my desk, I pull up Taylor’s Facebook page. At the top of her feed sits a status update posted less than an hour ago: The school that once promised to nurture and protect me has sided with an abuser today. I’m disappointed but not surprised. Expanding the thread of comments, one with a couple dozen likes shows up first: I’m so, so sorry. Is there any other course of action you can take, or is this the end? Taylor’s response turns my mouth dry.
In no way is this the end, she writes.
During my break, I go outside to the alley behind the hotel and dig a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the bottom of my purse. I smoke leaning against a fire escape, scrolling through my phone until I hear the scuff of shoes on pavement, a shush, a muffled laugh. Looking up, I see the two girls from my walk to work. They stand now at the far end of the alley, the blond girl clutching the black-haired one’s arm.
“Go ask her,” the blonde says. “Do it.”
The black-haired girl takes a step toward me, stops, crosses her arms. “Hey,” she calls. “Can we, um . . .” She looks over her shoulder to the blonde, who holds a fist against her mouth, grinning behind the cuff of her jean jacket.
“Do you have an extra cigarette?” the black-haired girl asks.
When I hold out two, they both rush forward. “They’re a little stale,” I say. That’s ok, they say. That’s totally fine. The blonde swings her backpack off one shoulder, pulls a lighter out of the front pocket. They light each other’s, cheeks hollowing as they inhale. They’re close enough for me to see the cat-eye points of their eyeliner, the tiny zits along their hairlines. When I’m around girls their age, the magic age Strane taught me to mythologize, I feel myself become him. Questions pile up in my mouth, ones designed to make them linger. I bite down hard to keep them from pouring out—what are your names, how old are you, do you want more cigarettes, or beer, or weed? 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.
The girls thank me over their shoulders as they move back down the alley, their giddiness replaced with a languid cool thanks to the cigarettes between their fingers. Swaying their hips, they turn the corner, give me one last look, and are gone.
I stare at the spot where they disappeared, the setting sun glinting off a stream of water leaking from a dumpster, the windshield of an idling delivery van. I wonder what those girls saw when they looked at me, if they sensed a kinship, if the reason they dared ask me for a cigarette was because they could tell that, despite my age, really I’m one of them.
With an exhale of smoke, I pull out my phone and bring up Taylor’s profile, but I see nothing. My mind is gone, galloping after the girls, wanting to know what Strane would think of them with their bummed cigarettes and tough attitudes. He’d probably find them coarse, too confident, risky. You’re so yielding, he’d say as I let him move my body around. He made it a compliment, my passivity a precious and rare thing.
What would she do? It’s a question that’s more like a maze, one I can get lost in at the sight of any teenage girl. If her teacher tried to touch her, would she react the way she should, shove his hand away and flee? Or would she let her body go limp until he was through? I try sometimes to imagine another girl doing what I did—sink into the pleasure of it, crave it, build her life around it—but I can’t. My brain hits a dead end, the maze swallowed by darkness. Unthinkable. Unspeakable.
I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing, he’d said. It sounds like delusion. What girl would want what he did to me? But it’s the truth, whether anyone believes it or not. 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.
But no, that word isn’t right, never has been. It’s a cop-out, a lie in the way it’s wrong to call me a victim and nothing more. He was never so simple; neither was I.
Taking the long way back to the hotel lobby, I walk through the lowest level of the parking garage into the basement, past the din of the laundry room’s industrial-sized washers and dryers. The head of housekeeping stops me in the stairwell, asks if I mind bringing an extra set of towels to Mr. Goetz, the every-other-Monday businessman, in room 342.
“You sure you don’t mind?” she asks as she hands me the towels. “He can be a sleaze to my girls, but he likes you.”
Knocking on 342, I hear footsteps, then Mr. Goetz opens the door—shirtless and clutching a towel around his waist, wet hair, water droplets on his shoulders, dark hair on his chest, down the middle of his stomach.
At the sight of me, his face brightens. “Vanessa! Wasn’t expecting you.” He opens the door wider, nods for me to come inside. “Can you put the towels down on the bed?”
Hesitating at the threshold, I calculate the distance from the door to the bed and the distance from the bed to the credenza, where Mr. Goetz is using his free hand to open his wallet, the other still holding the towel. I don’t want the door to close, don’t want to be alone with him. I have to rush, lunging over to the bed and dropping the towels. I’m back at the door before it has a chance to shut.
“Hold on a second.” Mr. Goetz holds out a twenty. I start to shake my head—it’s too big of a tip for something as routine as fresh towels, suspiciously big, enough to make me want to run. He waves the bill at me like you would a piece of food to a wary stray. Stepping back into the room, I take the money and, as I do, he runs his fingers over mine. Gives me a wink. “Thanks, honey,” he says.