“I mean, did he have sex with you? Force you? Or . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it.”
Tossing the napkins in the garbage, she sits back down. “No,” she says. “He didn’t.”
“What about the other girls?”
She shakes her head no.
I exhale loudly, relieved. “So what exactly did he do to you?”
“He abused me.”
“But . . .” I look around the coffee shop, as though the people sitting at other tables might be able to help. “What does that mean? Did he kiss you, or . . .”
“I don’t want to focus on the details,” Taylor says. “It’s not helpful.”
“Helpful?”
“To the cause.”
“What cause?”
She tilts her head and squints, the same look Strane used to give me when I was floundering. For a moment, I think she’s again doing an impression of him. “The cause of holding him accountable.”
“But he’s dead. What do you want to do to him, drag his body through the streets?”
Her eyes widen.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That came out wrong.”
She closes her eyes and inhales, holds the breath, and then lets it go. “It’s fine. This is hard to talk about. We’re both doing the best we can.”
She starts to talk about the article, how the goal of it is to bring to light all the ways the system failed us. “They all knew,” she says, “and they did nothing to stop him.” I assume she means Browick, the administration, but don’t ask questions. She talks so fast; it’s hard to keep up. Another goal of the article, she says, is to connect with other survivors.
“You mean in general?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Survivors of him.”
“There are others?”
“There has to be. I mean, he taught for thirty years.” She cups her hands around her empty mug, purses her lips. “So I know you said you don’t want to be in the article.” I open my mouth, but she continues. “You can be completely anonymous. No one would know it’s you. I know it’s scary, but think of the good it would do. Vanessa, what you went through . . .” She ducks her head, looks straight at me. “It’s the kind of story that has the power to change the way people think.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“I know it’s scary,” she says again. “The idea terrified me at first.”
“No,” I say, “it’s not that.”
She waits for me to explain, her eyes darting.
“I don’t consider myself to have been abused,” I say. “Definitely not the way you all do.”
Her pale eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “You don’t think you were abused?”
The air seems sucked out of the coffee shop, noises amplified, colors muted. “I don’t think of myself as a victim,” I say. “I knew what I was getting into. I wanted it.”
“You were fifteen.”
“Even at fifteen.”
I go on, justifying myself, words spilling out of me, the same old lines. He and I were two dark people who craved the same things; our relationship was terrible but never abusive. The more alarmed Taylor’s expression becomes, the more I dig in. When I say what he and I had was the kind of thing great love stories are made of, she holds her hand up to her mouth, like she’s about to be sick.
“And if I’m being totally honest,” I say, “I think what you and this journalist are doing is pretty fucked up.”
Her face scrunches in disbelief. “Are you serious?”
“It seems dishonest. There are things you say about him that don’t line up with what I know was true.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I think you’re making him out to be something worse than he was.”
“How can you say that when you know what he did to me?”
“But I don’t know what he did to you,” I say. “You won’t tell me.”
Her eyes flutter shut. She presses her palms on the table, as though calming herself down. Slowly, she says, “You know he was a pedophile.”
“No,” I say, “he wasn’t.”
“You were fifteen,” she says. “I was fourteen.”
“That’s not pedophilia,” I say. She stares at me agog. I clear my throat and say, carefully, “The more correct term is ephebophile.”
And with that, the wire connecting her and me goes slack. She holds up her hands as though to say, I’m done. She says she needs to go back to work, won’t look at me as she gathers her empty coffee cup and phone.
I follow her out of the shop, tripping a little over the doorway. I have a sudden urge to reach out, to grab her braid and not let go. Outside, the sidewalk is empty save for a man with his hands shoved in his coat pockets and eyes fixed on the ground, whistling one steady single note as he walks toward us. Taylor watches the man, her face so furious I think she’s going to snap at him to shut up, but as he passes by, she whirls around, jabs her finger at me.
“I used to think about you all the time back when he was abusing me,” she says. “I thought you were the only person who could understand what I was going through. I thought . . .” She takes a breath, lets her arm drop. “Who cares what I thought. I was wrong, obviously wrong.” She starts to walk off, stops, and adds, “I received death threats after I came forward. Did you know that? People posted my address online and said they were going to rape and murder me.”
“Yes,” I say, “I know that.”
“It’s selfish to watch the rest of us not be believed and do nothing to help. If you came forward, no one would be able to ignore you. They’d have to believe you and then they’d believe us, too.”
“But I don’t understand what that would give you. He’s dead. He’s not going to apologize. He’ll never admit he did anything wrong.”
“It’s not about him,” she says. “If you came forward, Browick would have to admit that it happened. They’d be held responsible. It could change how that school is run.”
She looks at me expectantly. I lift my shoulders and she huffs a frustrated sigh.
“I feel sorry for you,” she says.
As she starts to walk away, I reach out. My fingers brush her back. “Tell me what he did to you,” I say. “Don’t say he abused you. Tell me what happened.”
She turns, her eyes wild.
“Did he kiss you? Did he bring you into his office?”
“Office?” she repeats, and I close my eyes, relieved at her confusion. “Why does it matter so much to you?” she asks.
I open my mouth, the word because poised to come out—because—because whatever happened to you couldn’t have been so bad, because it’s ridiculous for you to demand so much when I’m the one who bore the brunt of him. I’m the one marked for life.
“He groped me, ok?” she says. “In the classroom, behind his desk.”
I breathe out and turn limp, swaying as I stand. Like Strane under the spruce tree at the Halloween dance. You know what I want to do to you? At that point, he’d only touched me—groped behind his desk.