g00dr34ds’s Reviews > My Dark Vanessa > Status Update

“”He’ll never meet you,” I say. It’s a hard truth, carrying within it grief and joy.”

“With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.”

“There must be a point where you're allowed to be defined by something other than what he did to you.”

“But those years aren’t lost. They’ve just been neglected for a while. You can recover yourself.”

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they're nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”

"Men like that know how to pick the right ones, you know? They're real predators. They know how to scan a herd and select the weak."

“…and I think, Maybe that's all it was. I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy.”

“I tell myself it's all in my head and that this is how normal teachers treat their best stu-dents, a little special attention, nothing to lose your mind over. It's just that I'm depraved, my mind so warped by Strane that I misinterpret innocent favoritism as sexual interest.”

“When we go to bed on his flannel sheets, we keep our clothes on and I think of this girl he touched, faceless and bodiless, a specter of an accusation and a harbinger of the obvious: that I am getting older, and each passing day brings girls into the world who are younger than me, who might someday end up in his classroom.”

“Before I sit, I gauge the distance of the chair from his desk-close but far enough away that he can't reach over and suddenly touch me.”