Who You Really Were

Please note this story contains sensitive material, abuse of power and a relationship with an underaged person.

I should have known better. I had a boyfriend when we first met, a really lovely boyfriend with sandy brown hair and a permanently perplexed demeanour as he attempted to deal with me. Truth be told he was dull as dishwater and brought me into his life and planted me like an exotic flower in soil from the garden centre. He wanted me to “doe normal” as they say in the Netherlands, calm down, fit in, stop wearing floral patterns.

I was visiting my new office where I would begin work in August and we bumped into one another on the stairs. It was a heart-stopping moment and you were a heart-stopper. Blonde and muscular with bright blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face. That’s how I saw you at least—Lord knows if anyone else would have given you a second glance that day, but to me you looked delicious, like fresh meat.

We immediately entered into a game of cat and mouse, me pushing, you pulling. I once told you over lunch that I had a dream about you. You blushed and let out a surprised giggle like it just slipped out. I was burning up, delighted by my audacity and a head full of possibilities.

We started a ritual (you loved rituals) of going to dinner after work on a Thursday. I looked forward to it with an enthusiasm that was hard to contain. Whispered exchanges in the corner of some half-empty bar, your hand on my knee. The first time we kissed I dragged you down an alley; your mouth on mine was so soft, so gentle. I cried on the train home, thinking “I made that girl love me”.

One weekend your girlfriend was going to be away and you asked me if I wanted to go boxing and then to stay over. I was hesitant—on the one hand, of course I wanted to, on the other hand… what about your girlfriend? “Don’t worry,” you reassured me, you had “excellent self-control”. That turned out to be true in many ways, but not when it came to me.

Several weeks later your girlfriend was history, as was my boyfriend, but we hadn’t blossomed into the hot and heavy romance I was imagining. This irritated and stressed me out. I had come out to my parents for you. But you were more suspicious than I would have expected; you thought I left my tampon wrapper in the bin on purpose so your girlfriend would find it and know I had been there. You were also way more in love with her and still attached to her in a way I also wasn’t expecting, spinning me tales of her childhood and her pitiful story of parental neglect (I empathised, but also who wants to hear that?). The stories also didn’t quite add up—first you had met in a club, then a bar, then at a skate park. Why did the story keep changing?

After a few weeks of this, sleeping in your bed but discussing your ex-girlfriend at length each evening, I decided to do some investigating. Something wasn’t right. You seemed almost obsessed with her story: a champion skier at 15, a drug addict at 16… then you. You came in somewhere, but it wasn’t clear when. You were a teacher at a nearby school and she was a student at a nearby university? But five years later she still hadn’t graduated, and you didn’t seem to find this strange.

A cold knot began forming in my stomach, but I tried to brush it off as paranoia. Still, late one evening while you slept, I opened my laptop. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, heavy with a dread I didn’t yet have a name for.

This was around 2017—the dying embers of the freedom of the open internet were still glowing somewhat. This was before GDPR and highly protected privacy settings. Schools were still posting photos of student trips online. All I had to do was Google your names together, and there it appeared. You, a supervisor on the trip; her, a student. I felt myself go cold. This was no joke—you had violated the most sacred part of teaching: don’t touch the students.

I didn’t feel like the cat in our game anymore; I felt like a stupid, fetid mouse. Falling for your lies and your stories. That night I told you what I had found. You turned it around and accused me of having borderline personality disorder. If I’d had more sense, more life experience, I would have laughed. But I didn’t. I was shocked, upset—how could you think this of me? My instinct was to try to prove you wrong, that I was sane, stable. You loved that word, “unstable”.

By the next day you were speaking furtively on the phone to your ex-girlfriend, both of you mentioning Google’s new feature, the “right to be forgotten”. Before I could so much as double-check what I had found, the photos were gone. Vanished off the face of the internet. You told me that her mother had left her alone over Christmas and you needed to take care of her, that she was addicted to meth, that she had seen her ex-boyfriend die. A heartbreaking story, I will attest to that, but not a reason to date her… I was delusional, I wanted so badly to believe you were the person I thought you were that I convinced myself you hadn’t touched her before graduation, that it had just been an intense sort of support.

Later, when you went skiing and I was minding your vicious dog, I had a look through the bookshelves and found your diary from that time. You hadn’t waited. You had written love letters to each other starting when she was still in middle school. I felt sick, clammy, and dizzy. There was no denying who you were or what you did. I think the most shocking part of the diary didn’t even involve your romance with a teenager—it was what came before that. Upon visiting the school, in the very first entry, you wrote the following:

“The girls look so much older than I expected…”