I was 17 the first time my teacher touched me. He was 47.
I was 14 or 15 the first time he paid me special attention, but a senior when he made me feel confident enough to “make the first move” in his classroom, during school hours, with the door locked, back by the closet with the shades pulled down.
This went on the whole spring semester and, I’m mortified to admit, throughout college. He had me under his thumb. He told me I was so smart, so talented, so far above the rest of his students. I was special. I saw him, and he saw me.
I know, now, that what he saw was a victim. An easy target. A girl already fractured. I felt so alienated in my own mind that I was desperate for validation — proof that there wasn’t something wrong with me, that I was just better than these other people. Nobody got me like he did.
We’d meet when I had study hall, or yearbook class, or after school while I was supposed to be tutoring younger students. He’d make thinly veiled references to our “connection” during lectures, read my work aloud, have me sit with him behind his desk while my peers did their classwork and shot me sidelong glances. Once, standing next to him at his desk, he put his hand up my dress and I gasped so audibly that a classmate glanced over.
I’d come into the classroom to find flowers, poetry, little treats on my desk. He’d email me later about my “sweet tight jeans.” He openly resented my (age-appropriate) boyfriend until I ended the relationship. He told me the fantasies he’d had of me over the past year and perhaps even earlier. I’d sneak out of my parents’ house at night and meet him in the neighbor’s dark field. He was a “family friend.” He had unfettered access to me.
Once, early on, in his car, he asked when my birthday was. When I told him, he feigned hesitation about the fact that I had “just been 16.” But he didn’t move his hand from my thigh. Around the same time, he said, “I’m afraid you’ll think of me in the future as some kind of predator.” They tell on themselves every time.
It should’ve been clear to anyone bothering to pay attention. It was a small town; people talked. But no one did anything.
I don’t blame my peers; we were children, after all. Nearly every adult in my life failed me spectacularly. The one aunt who tried to raise the alarm — who saw him for what he was — was ridiculed and shunned. I still regret that today.
He wasn’t the first man to hurt me, and he certainly wasn’t the last; for a long time, I barely acknowledged the hurt he caused because it felt so insignificant. For so long after we were together, I viewed him as just a toxic ex-boyfriend — an abuser, sure, but not a predator. And even when that word did escape my pen for the first time — I did nothing. For a long time.
Shame is such a powerful detractor. I was ashamed I had let this happen to me, ashamed I had pursued it in the first place, ashamed that, as a feminist, I could not protect myself from an abusive relationship. So I did nothing.
I did nothing even when I finally told my siblings and friends who cared about me, who urged me to come forward with their full support. I did nothing when my therapist, after finally coaxing the story out of me, lovingly called me a “fucking cliché” — it’s always the English teachers. I did nothing when I found out about the other girl, the one a few years before me, whose near-identical story I read in her own handwriting in a letter hidden in his house.
I did nothing about him, even when a college professor (English, of course) tried the same thing on me and a friend. We went to the head of the department. We went to the Title IX office. He was denied tenure and later fled back to his home state, and I tell that story with so much righteousness despite not being able to remember most of it, not really, not after we got the ball rolling and my panic response set in and we were really doing it.
I couldn’t have done it alone. I wouldn’t have if it were just me.
It wasn’t until a few more years later that I realized I’d been letting that later victory stand in for the one I hadn’t yet won. Because I did nothing about my high school teacher. I never publicly said any of this until now, and even now, I have to use a pseudonym to protect myself. Still — hi, Joe. I hope this sounds familiar. I hope your day’s been terrible.