Are You Sure That's How it Happened

by Marissa Korbel

Every once in awhile, I get the impulse to look again. A whole body itch, from my fingers to my knees. Rifle papers, digging through stacked, moldy boxes. Handwritten 20 years ago, the play I wrote about him, the poems. But it’s not my words I’m looking for, it’s his; printed out emails with subject lines like “DELETE DELETE,” and cut-and-paste IMs. Rissabelle, my AOL handle, became his pet name for me.

I don’t have that evidence anymore. I gave my copies to my Mom, who gave them to the police.

*

The thing about writing about my relationship with my high school teacher is that the subject is evergreen, always timely. That’s depressing.

May began with Brigitte Trogneux, the new French PM’s wife, who met Emmanuel when he was her 15-year-old drama student. “They developed a closer relationship when they worked together to re-write a play;” and “the teenager’s parents were shocked when they discovered he had started an affair with his married school teacher.”

After my theater teacher was fired, I would wake up crying because I was sure that he hated me. I saw it like a movie reel in my mind. Police at his door. His wife crying. How did he explain it? I was sure he said I was lying. What else would he say? I thought no one would believe me without evidence. I think that’s why I handed over a year’s worth of emails.

It was a messy, impossible thing to walk around with. I forgot how to be in the world, in my body, present tense. I pulled myself through the house in the morning, ate like a mindless, glazed over zombie, slapped my shoes on, drove to school distracted, moved through my day on autopilot. A foot. A foot. A foot.

My truth was something much messier than the story they gave me. I had wanted him, had said yes to everything we did together. There was too much happening at once, like sensory overload, but it felt good. Only he knew what it had been like when it was just my body and his body, tangled together like one thing. The tension of doing the wrong thing, together.

*

Last week, the New York Times was ran a series of letters from a teacher at Andover to his 16-year-old student, to supplement their reporting on exclusive boarding schools’ sexual abuse scandals. “He would give her a grade, critique her work and then, in a different colored pen, write something more familiar, asking her to play tennis, or saying he would help her break curfew. He was handsome and he was her teacher, and she was flattered. . . She thought she was in love with him. But she was also frightened.”

Every once in awhile, I get the impulse to look again. A whole body itch, from my fingers to my knees. Rifle papers, digging through stacked, moldy boxes. Handwritten 20 years ago, the play I wrote about him, the poems. But it’s not my words I’m looking for, it’s his; printed out emails with subject lines like “DELETE DELETE,” and cut-and-paste IMs. Rissabelle, my AOL handle, became his pet name for me.

I don’t have that evidence anymore. I gave my copies to my Mom, who gave them to the police.

*

The thing about writing about my relationship with my high school teacher is that the subject is evergreen, always timely. That’s depressing.

May began with Brigitte Trogneux, the new French PM’s wife, who met Emmanuel when he was her 15-year-old drama student. “They developed a closer relationship when they worked together to re-write a play;” and “the teenager’s parents were shocked when they discovered he had started an affair with his married school teacher.”

After my theater teacher was fired, I would wake up crying because I was sure that he hated me. I saw it like a movie reel in my mind. Police at his door. His wife crying. How did he explain it? I was sure he said I was lying. What else would he say? I thought no one would believe me without evidence. I think that’s why I handed over a year’s worth of emails.

It was a messy, impossible thing to walk around with. I forgot how to be in the world, in my body, present tense. I pulled myself through the house in the morning, ate like a mindless, glazed over zombie, slapped my shoes on, drove to school distracted, moved through my day on autopilot. A foot. A foot. A foot.

My truth was something much messier than the story they gave me. I had wanted him, had said yes to everything we did together. There was too much happening at once, like sensory overload, but it felt good. Only he knew what it had been like when it was just my body and his body, tangled together like one thing. The tension of doing the wrong thing, together.

*

Last week, the New York Times was ran a series of letters from a teacher at Andover to his 16-year-old student, to supplement their reporting on exclusive boarding schools’ sexual abuse scandals. “He would give her a grade, critique her work and then, in a different colored pen, write something more familiar, asking her to play tennis, or saying he would help her break curfew. He was handsome and he was her teacher, and she was flattered. . . She thought she was in love with him. But she was also frightened.”

Marissa's featured column Backbone is a 6-month series on Corporeal Clamor. More of her work can be found in The Rumpus, The Manifest Station, Nailed Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and The Establishment, among others. Her essay, "No, Lolita," was named one of Entropy Magazine's Best Online Articles & Essays of 2016. Her poetry has been anthologized in Only Light Can Do That (PEN/ The Rattling Wall 2016) and Things I Have to Tell You (Candlewick, 1998). Marissa is currently writing a collection of lyric essays and revising an experimental memoir. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and their toddler.