Page 59 of XX Love Affair

Delia looked like she didn’t quite believe that. Nobody did.

“He was my English teacher. Mr. Smith.” Although he had allowed her to call him by his first name, Helena preferred to think of him as she had met him. Quoting Chaucer like it was impressive. Well, it was. Quoting anything off the top of one’s head was impressive to a freshman. “I’ve never been super naïve. I knew he was attracted to me, and I had plenty of opportunities to see how much because I would often have to wait in his classroom after school for my mom to pick me up. I could tell he was denying it. Trying to be a good guy who didn’t go after one of his students. So, I got aggressive. Told him one day that I didn’t mind. I thought he was cute. I liked him a lot more than any of my classmates. They were so immature. He wasn’t. He paid taxes and knew what it was like to be alive.”

“Ah, yes, the two classic hallmarks of adulthood.”

“Shut up. I mean what I said. I pursued him.”

“Helena…” Delia’s attempt to maintain decorum wasn’t helping the situation. “You were fifteen. Sixteen, at most. A kid.”

Boy, she hated it when people called her a kid.

“Obviously, we got caught, but it was a good three months.” Helena scoffed. “My least favorite teacher, no less. I mean, the calculus teacher. She saw something, I guess. Brought up concerns to the principal, the superintendent, and anyone who would listen. So next thing I knew, I was getting interviewed and my mom was freaking the fuck out. Everyone coddled me so much, acting like I was a victim. I hated it. So what if it wouldn’t have lasted? I don’t romanticize that relationship now but… to imply I didn’t know what I was doing…”

“All right. Okay.” Delia created more distance between them. Helena knew it. This was why she never told anyone about Mr. Smith, her favorite teacher ever. The one who taught me what it was like to feel alive like every cell in your body is heeding the call of the sensory world.

“I don’t know if he’s in jail right now. I haven’t talked to him since it all happened. Don’t care. I mean, what we did was illegal for him, I realize that… and yeah, teachers shouldn’t sleep with their students. I get that. I don’t even disagree. But…”

Delia gave her space to think, although the energy radiating off her was far from compassionate.

“That was the day I realized nobody cared about me. It didn’t matter what I said, what deal I was willing to make, how much I begged my mom to not press charges, not even when I went to her in good faith and tried to talk to her about it. I was willing, too. I would have told her whatever she wanted to hear, but she didn’t even care about that. All the adults only wanted to use me as a prop heralding the evils of the world.”

Finally, Delia spoke. “So, you doubled down.”

“I guess. I was tired of people acting like I was some perpetual victim. I’m not, you know? I’m living my life like whatever. Simply trying to do what I can before the world moves on without me. Until I have to go back to Washington and be the victim everyone thinks I am.”

It felt good to get that off her chest. Helena had been holding that in, whispering it to herself in the mirror and under her lonely bed covers, for as long as she had her name redacted in newspaper reports. The system had assured the event wouldn’t follow her for the rest of her life, but it didn’t stop the people who did know from making wild assumptions about her. In a way, Helena preferred the unhinged weirdos online who called her a slut and asked how she dressed. They were open with their thoughts. They took her seriously as a young woman with agency.

Even though she was a teenager. Even though somewhere, between her ever-thinking brain and gut reactions, she knew where the well-meaning adults came from.

But she couldn’t admit that yet. Helena was not in the position to look back on her teen years and say, “Good God, what a mess I was.”

Oh, yet it was there. Teasing the liminal space that was her brain. So, so close to the cusp of knowing who she was and who she wanted to be.

“I may be out of line here,” Delia eventually said, “but it kinda sounds like you responded to the whole incident with hypersexuality.”

“I’ve always been hypersexual. Why do you think I slept with my teacher?”

“That’s… not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” Helena finally drank the strange mocktail that looked better than it tasted. “You think I’m traumatized, so I’m trying to take control of my life through sex. Looking for validation in all the wrong places. Immature and afraid to face the truth – that I made a mistake I will never move on from. That I’m going to regret all of this, even you, eventually.”

“I don’t think that at all. I merely think you’ve been through a lot, and few people have listened to you. You were the center of that circus, but instead of hearing you out and respecting any of your wishes, they infantilized you. You reacted by taking your desires by the horns the moment you turned eighteen and nobody could say it was illegal for someone older to be with you again. You’ve made yourself readily available to people like me. You truly get off from it, yeah. I think you do. But…”

Here came that stupid but. Nobody ever helped themselves.

“The lifestyle can chew you up and spit you out. You have to be prepared for things to go south, with anyone. Sex with strangers isn’t therapy, but I think you know that by now. Most twenty-one-year-olds do.”

That’s right. Helena was still lying to Delia about her age. Funny… She had confessed something to her girlfriend she never had to anyone else before, but she was still lying about something as important as that. Because based on conversations they had before, including this one, Delia probably wouldn’t be with Helena if she knew that truth.

“So? What do you think I should do?” Helena testily asked although a part of her was genuinely curious about Delia’s answer. “Resist what I want to do?”

“No. You like having sex. I’d be a giant hypocrite if I didn’t say I enjoyed that about you. You like doing wild and crazy shit for attention. You get off on more than the act itself. If you’re careful and just selective enough, you might have an adventurous future ahead of you making the most of your twenties and thirties. With, you know… therapy to go with it. Make sure you’re not doing something because you think you have to or to prove a point to yourself.”

“You sound a lot like my old coach right now.”

“Excuse me?”

Helena realized how out of left field that sounded. Like a ball sailing across the field and coming straight for my face. Helena always ran for those, foot ready to strike. “My varsity soccer coach. Coach Morgan. She says stuff like that, so sage, so stupidly wise. Made me sick. You know… turned out she was banging her assistant coach the whole season. That coach was her former student. Heard she was a virgin, too. Can you believe it? Honestly, made me sick that they could get away with it. Because the girl was twenty-one when they got together? How is that okay if she was still Coach Morgan’s former pupil? I even confronted them about it.”