My Dark Vanessa(80)
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.