Excerpt from My Dark Vanessa by Kate Russell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At Browick, he said, teacher-student romances were known to happen from time to time, but he'd never had one because, before me, he'd never had the desire. I was the first student who put the thought in his head. There was something about me that made it worth the risk. I had an allure that drew him in.

It wasn't about how young I was, not for him. Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could talk to me, confide in me. Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. No one had ever understood that dark part of him until I came along.

"It's just my luck," he said, "that when I finally find my soul mate, she's fifteen years old."

"If you want to talk about luck," I countered, "try being fifteen and having your soul mate be some old guy."

He checked my face after I said this to make sure I was joking—of course I was. I wanted nothing to do with boys my own age, their dandruff and acne, how cruel they could be, cutting girls up into features, rating our body parts on a scale of one to ten. I wasn't made for them. I loved Strane's middle-aged caution, his slow courtship. He compared my hair to the color of maple leaves, slipped poetry into my hands—Emily, Edna, Sylvia. He made me see myself as he did, a girl with the power to rise with red hair and eat him like air. He loved me so much that sometimes after I left his classroom, he lowered himself into my chair and rested his head against the seminar table, trying to breathe in what was left of me. All of that happened before we even kissed. He was careful with me. He tried so hard to be good.

It's easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it's harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all. I think it stopped when I was twenty-two, when he said he needed to get himself together and couldn't live a decent life while I was within reach, but for the past decade there have been late-night calls, him and me reliving the past, worrying the wound we both refuse to let heal.

I assume I'll be the one he turns to in ten or fifteen years, whenever his body begins to break down. That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.



I get out of work at eleven and move through the empty downtown streets, counting each block I walk without checking Taylor's post as a personal victory. In my apartment, I still don't look at my phone. I hang up my work suit, take off my makeup, smoke a bowl in bed, and turn off the light. Self-control.

But in the dark, something shifts within me as I feel the bedsheets slide across my legs. Suddenly, I'm full of need—to be reassured, to hear him say, plainly, that of course he didn't do what that girl says he did. I need him to say again that she's lying, that she was a liar ten years ago and is a liar still, taken in now by the siren song of victimhood.

He answers halfway through the first ring, as though expecting me to call. "Vanessa."

"I'm sorry. I know it's late." I balk then, unsure how to ask for what I want. It's been so long since we last did this. My eyes travel the dark room, taking in the outline of the open closet door, the streetlight shadow across the ceiling. Out in the kitchen, the refrigerator hums and the faucet drips. He owes me this, for my silence, my loyalty.

"I'll be quick," I say. "Just a few minutes."

There's the rustle of blankets as he sits up in bed and moves the phone from one ear to the other, and for a moment I think he's about to say no. But then, in the half whisper that turns my bones to milk, he begins to tell me what I used to be: Vanessa, you were young and dripping with beauty. You were teenage and erotic and so alive, it scared the hell out of me.

Excerpted from My Dark Vanessa by Karen Russell. Copyright © 2020 by Karen Russell. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.