My Dark Vanessa(64)
The next day, a box arrives in the mail postmarked the day before he jumped from the bridge. Inside I find Polaroids, letters, cards, and photocopies of essays I wrote for his class, everything resting on a bed of yellowed cotton—the strawberry pajamas he bought for me the first time we slept together. There’s no note, but I need no explanation. It’s all the evidence, every last bit he had.
The story spreads across the state. Local TV news runs a segment with quick shots of the Browick campus, students walking on pathways shaded by pine trees, white clapboard dorms, the administration building with its columned facade. There’s a lingering shot of the humanities building. Then the same photo of Strane and, beneath it, his misspelled name: jacob strain.
Time disappears as I scroll through comment sections, Facebook posts, Twitter threads, my phone dinging every so often from the Google Alert I’ve set for his name. On my laptop, I keep fifteen tabs open at a time, jumping from one to the other, and when I’ve caught up on all the comments, I watch the news clip. The first time I watched it, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up, but I’ve forced myself to sit through it so many times, I turn numb to it. No reaction when Strane’s photo flashes on-screen. When the newscaster says “allegations from five different students,” I don’t even flinch.
After about twenty-four hours, the story travels south. It’s picked up by papers in Boston and New York, and then people start writing think pieces. In an attempt to complicate the current cultural trend of allegations, they give the articles titles like “Has This Reckoning Gone Too Far?” and “When Allegations Turn Deadly” and “It’s Time to Talk About the Danger of Accusations Without Due Process.” The think pieces feature Taylor alongside Strane, and out of her they craft an archetype of the overzealous accuser, a millennial social justice warrior who never stopped to think about the consequences of her actions. Some defend Taylor on social media, but the louder voices vilify her. They call her selfish, heartless, a murderer—because his death is her doing; she drove him to suicide. The host of a men’s rights podcast devotes an entire episode to the story, calls Strane a victim of the tyranny of feminism, and his listeners go after Taylor. They get her phone number, her home and work addresses. Taylor posts on Facebook screenshots of emails and texts from anonymous men threatening to rape her, to kill her and cut up her body. Then, a few hours later, she vanishes. Her profile goes on lockdown, all the public content gone. It happens so fast.
Meanwhile, I keep calling out of work, days lost to my open laptop, my nightstand crowded with food wrappers and empty bottles. I drink, smoke, and study Strane’s photos of me as a baby-faced, thin-limbed teen. In them I look impossibly young, topless and grinning in one, holding my arms out toward the camera. In another I’m slouching in the passenger seat of his station wagon, shooting the camera a glare. In another I’m lying facedown on his bed, the sheet pulled up to my waist. I remember inspecting that last photo after he took it and thinking it strange that he thought it was sexy, but I tried to see it that way, too. I had told myself it was like something out of a music video.
I grab my laptop, google “Fiona Apple Criminal,” bring up the video, and there’s teenage Fiona, sullen and lithe. She sings about being a bad girl, and I think of the divorcé asking me this in the alley behind the bar: Have you been a bad girl? You look like you’ve been bad. I remember Strane lamenting how I turned him into a criminal. I saw such power in that. I could have sent him to jail, and in my brattiest moments, I’d imagined it—Strane in a lonely little cell, with nothing to do but think about me.
The video ends and I gather the pictures, dump them back into the box. That fucking box. Ordinary girls have shoeboxes of love letters and dried-out corsages; I get a stack of child porn. If I were smart, I’d burn everything, especially the photos, because I know how they’d look to a normal person, like something confiscated from a sex-trafficking ring, evidence of an obvious crime—but I could never. It would be like setting myself on fire.
I wonder if it’s possible for me to be arrested for having photos of myself. I wonder if maybe this is me turning into a predator, if the way I get excited around teenage girls says something about me. I think about how abusive people are always abused as kids. They say it’s a cycle, avoidable if you’re willing to do the work. But I’m too lazy to take out the trash, too lazy to clean. No, none of this even applies to me. I wasn’t abused, not like that.
Stop thinking. Let yourself grieve—but how can I grieve when there hasn’t been an obituary, nothing about a funeral, only these articles written by strangers? I don’t know who would even arrange a funeral, maybe his sister who lives in Idaho? But even if there is a funeral, who would go? I couldn’t go. People would see me, and then they’d know. Tell me what happened, they’d say. Tell us what he did to you.
My brain starts to skip, my bedroom suddenly seems lit by a strobe, so I take an Ativan, smoke a bowl, and lie back. I always let the pill sink in before I decide whether to do another lap. I never go overboard. I’m careful, which is how I know my problem is mild, if I even have a problem, which I maybe don’t.
It’s fine. The drinking, the pot, the Ativan, even Strane—it’s perfectly fine. It’s nothing. It’s normal. All interesting women had older lovers when they were young. It’s a rite of passage. You go in a girl and come out not quite a woman but closer, a girl more conscious of herself and her own power. Self-awareness is a good thing. It leads to confidence, knowing one’s place in the world. He made me see myself in a way a boy my own age never could. No one can convince me that I would have been better off if I’d been like the other girls at school, giving blow jobs and hand jobs, all that endless labor, before being deemed a slut and thrown away. At least Strane loved me. At least I knew how it felt to be worshipped. He fell at my feet before he even kissed me.