My Dark Vanessa(38)

Back in the lobby, safe behind the concierge desk, I take the twenty and shove it in my purse, tell myself I’ll spend it on pepper spray, a pocketknife, something I can carry on me even if I never use it. Just to know it’s there.

Then my phone buzzes: a new email.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Browick School Story

Hi Vanessa,

My name is Janine Bailey and I’m a staff writer at Femzine currently working on a piece about the allegations of sexual abuse at the Browick School in Norumbega, Maine, where I understand you attended from 1999 to 2001.

I’ve interviewed a Browick graduate, Taylor Birch, who alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2006 by English teacher Jacob Strane, and your name was mentioned as another potential victim during my interview with Ms. Birch. Through my research, I’ve also received a separate anonymous tip regarding sexual abuse that allegedly occurred at the Browick School involving you and Mr. Strane.

Vanessa, I would love to talk with you. I’m committed to writing this piece with all the necessary sensitivity, and want to prioritize the survivors’ stories while holding Jacob Strane and the Browick School accountable. With the current nationwide focus on stories of sexual assault, I think we have a real opportunity to make an impact here, especially if I were able to pair your story with Taylor’s. You would, of course, have control over what would appear in the article regarding your experience. Think of this as the chance for you to tell your story on your own terms.

You can reach me at this email, or at (385) 843-0999. Call or text anytime.

Really hope to hear from you,

Janine





2001




Winter makes everyone weary this year. The cold is relentless, nights dipping to twenty below, and when the temperature goes above zero, it snows—days and days of it. After each storm, the snow banks grow until campus becomes a walled maze under a pale gray sky, and clothes that were new at Christmas quickly turn salt-stained and pilled as the reality of four more months of winter settles in. Teachers are impatient, even mean, giving faculty feedback so harsh we leave advisee meetings in tears. Over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, the Gould janitor, fed up with us, locks the bathroom when a wad of hair clogs the shower drain for the millionth time, and Ms. Thompson has to use a paper clip to pick the lock. Students turn crazy, too. One night in the dining hall, Deanna and Lucy erupt into a screaming fight over a lost pair of shoes, Lucy grabbing a handful of Deanna’s hair and refusing to let go.

Dorm parents are always on the lookout for signs of depression because a sophomore boy hanged himself in his room four winters ago. Ms. Thompson organizes a lot of themed activities to help us stave off the bad feelings: game nights and craft nights, baking parties and movie showings, each announced on a brightly colored flyer slipped under our doors. She encourages us to come by her apartment and use her light therapy box if we ever feel like we’re “getting the SADs.”

Through it all, I’m only half there. My brain feels split, one part in the moment, the other existing within all the things that have happened to me. Now that Strane and I are having sex, I no longer fit in the places I used to. Everything I write feels hollow; I stop offering to walk Ms. Thompson’s dog. In class I feel disconnected, like I’m observing from a distance. During American lit I watch Jenny switch seats at the seminar table so she’s beside Hannah Levesque, who gazes at Jenny with wide-eyed adoration, the same expression I probably had all the time last year, and I feel a muted confusion, like I’m watching a movie with a disorienting plot. Truly, everything feels like a simulation, unreal. I have no choice but to pretend I’m the same as ever, but a canyon surrounds me now, sets me apart. I’m not sure if sex created the canyon or if it’s been there all along and Strane finally made me see it. Strane says it’s the latter. He says he sensed my difference as soon as he laid eyes on me.

“Haven’t you always felt like an outsider, a misfit?” he asks. “I’ll bet for as long as you can remember, you were called mature for your age. Weren’t you?”

I think back to third grade, how it felt to bring home a report card with a teacher’s note scribbled across the bottom: Vanessa is very advanced, seems like she’s eight years old going on thirty. I’m not sure I was ever really a kid at all.



Twenty minutes before curfew, I walk into the Gould bathroom with my shower caddy and towel to find Jenny standing at the sink, her face smeared with soap. Living in the same dorm, she and I inevitably run into each other, but I’ve done my best to reduce the frequency, opting for the back stairwell so I don’t walk past her room, taking my showers late in the evenings. We’re forced together in American lit, but there I’m so focused on Strane that it’s easy to ignore her. The rest of the class barely registers to me anymore.

So the sight of her in the bathroom wearing flip-flops and the same grungy bathrobe she had last year startles me so much, I reflexively start to duck back into the hallway. She stops me.

“You don’t have to run off,” she says, her voice languid as though bored. “Unless you really hate me that much?”

Her fingers rub her cheeks, massaging in the face wash. Her hair has grown out from the bob she had at the start of the year, enough now for a messy bun at the base of her slender neck—she used to act self-conscious about it, complained that it made her head look like a ball balancing on a straw, a flower on a stem. She acted the same way about her skinny fingers, her size six feet, constantly drawing attention to the features I envied the most. Do I still envy her? I sometimes notice Strane watching her in class, his eyes tracing the line of her spine up to her bright brown hair. The little Cleopatra. “Your neck is perfect, Jenny,” I would say. “You know it is.” And she did know; she must have known. She just wanted to hear me say it.