My Dark Vanessa

At the hotel, Vanessa remembers her first days on the job, eight years earlier. She works with Inez, observing the young girl’s maturity. One evening, a good-looking man in his 40s arrives, having requested a special turndown service. As he checks in, he smiles at Inez, and Vanessa notices that when he turns to walk across the lobby, he reaches for the hand of a teenage girl. Vanessa tries to tell Inez, but Inez does not see the girl, and Vanessa is distressed. After she helps a guest, the phone rings, and Vanessa answers; it is Janine Bailey, the journalist from the feminist magazine. Janine reveals to Vanessa that she has read Vanessa’s old private blog, which has reverted to a “default public setting” (231). Janine tells Vanessa that she plans to reference the blog in her article about Taylor Birch, and Vanessa starts to feel cooperative, until Janine tells Vanessa that she is also a “survivor” (232). Vanessa hangs up and runs to the bathroom, where she throws up.

Vanessa remembers going to a poetry reading a few years ago to hear Taylor recite her work. She remembers her obsession with Taylor and the fact that Taylor seemed “fine” (233) at the poetry reading. She also remembers her professor, Henry Plough, complimenting her paper on the role of rape in a Shakespeare play. Finally, she remembers herself as a young Lolita, beckoning to Strane, and wonders “how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me” (234).

Vanessa starts her senior year in high school, studying and applying to colleges. She makes new friends. In March, Vanessa is accepted to Atlantica College, a state school in Maine, and her future advisor sends her a personal note full of admiration for her poetry. Vanessa calls Strane to tell him the news, but he does not answer. She leaves a message letting him know where she will be in the fall and that she will be 18 by that time.

After Vanessa’s 18th birthday in April, she receives a message from Jenny requesting to chat online. During their exchange, Jenny apologizes for what she did to contribute to Vanessa’s expulsion from Browick, and Vanessa asks about Strane. Jenny reveals that Strane had written two memos describing Vanessa as a “troubled” (240) young woman who had invented the whole story. When Jenny asks Vanessa what happened between them, Vanessa writes “nothing happened” (241).

The next day, Vanessa’s parents give her permission to drive into town unaccompanied. She goes to Norumbega to confront Strane at his house and to tell him that she knows he lied to the school about their relationship. He manipulates her words, so that Vanessa remembers that she was “resolved to take the fall” (244) for both of them so he would not have to go to jail. Vanessa feels dumb for being angry and accepts a beer from Strane, entering his house to sit with him and to talk about the past two years. Strane makes a face when Vanessa talks about being “traumatized” (246) by what happened to her, claiming that he has suffered as well. Strane gives her another beer, then a third. Drunk by this point, Vanessa reveals to Strane that Jenny had read Strane’s letters to Mrs. Giles and that Vanessa knows about the letter Strane wrote to document Vanessa’s crush on him. He leads her upstairs and puts her to bed, alarmed by what Vanessa knows. She falls asleep but wakes when Strane gets into bed with her. They have sex, and afterward, Vanessa vomits over the side of the bed. They have sex again, and Vanessa feels “torn in two” (253). When Vanessa arrives home at nearly midnight, her mother is waiting up and forbids her from taking the car out again.

Vanessa graduates from high school and spends the summer working an auto parts warehouse. Strane picks her up from work some days and drops her at the top of her road, and Vanessa’s mother believes her lies about where she has been and with whom she has been. When Vanessa and Strane have sex, he asks her if she is still angry.

To her therapist, Vanessa explains that she feels harassed by the journalist and by Taylor, who has also tried to contact Vanessa. Ruby validates Vanessa’s trauma, but Vanessa denies that she is a victim, refusing to call her relationship with Strane a form of abuse. She defends Strane as a good person, and the whole story about Vanessa’s expulsion from Browick spills out. Ruby is visibly appalled, naming the humiliation Vanessa experienced and identifying Strane as the cause of Vanessa’s problems. Vanessa resists, explaining that she is angry at the world that drove Strane to suicide because “all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me” (263). Ruby reminds her that Strane’s death was not her fault, allowing Vanessa to bring the truth of her relationship with Strane out into the light. Vanessa stops talking, thinking of herself when she was a young girl who deserved to be punished.