Loving Teenage Monsters

It should be illegal to have floppy hair as an eighteen-year-old boy and own a guitar. It can be a violent combination to gaze upon when you’re a girl—add to that a pair of scuffed-up Converses? Forget it, you’re dead on sight. This vision was served up to me like dessert at dusk one day while sitting on the roof of a car, and my life was just about ruined.

Oliver’s shoes were scuffing the windshield of the ’93 Toyota Sienna and I didn’t care; I just hoped my boyfriend, Evan, didn’t see the way my pupils turned to hearts as Oliver brushed his bangs off his forehead and bit his plump bottom lip.

It’s next to impossible to see someone else’s sickness when you’re that young. My brain wasn’t fully developed that night, or for years after. Being in love fucks with you at any age—at least, that’s what my therapist ten years later would tell me, again and again. Ten years later, when the news cycle wouldn’t end. When the Daily Mail picked up what he’d done. When the nightmares wouldn’t dissipate from the swirling insides of my brain.

I’d spent my high school years coquettishly looking down at sketch pads in study halls. No one ever told me that to get a boy to like you, it’s beneficial to open your mouth and speak to them. I thought surely someone would notice I was beautiful and tell me about it.

It was the summer before college when I started lightly dating Evan, a sweet kid I met in photo class, who was two years younger than me and whose dad had a boat. He would pick me up with his car from my job at the local library because I hadn’t gotten around to taking my license test yet. I was quite literally a virgin who couldn’t drive, safely nestled in the two summer months between high school and college. It’s a non-age, a non-time. Nothing matters because everything is poised to change.

Evan and a group of scruffy guys in band tees and joints between their fingers were loitering outside when my shift ended. He asked me if I wanted to explore a haunted road with them. I looked past him, up at the boy perched on the hood of Evan’s car, holding a damn acoustic guitar.

Oliver laughed at everything I said that night, and after we sufficiently freaked ourselves out over imagined Victorian ladies crying and invisible movement in tree branches, Evan and I fought about something dumb and he refused to drive me home. Oliver couldn’t have offered fast enough.

I was mere weeks from starting college and deciding to dump Evan, so it seemed harmless to sit in Oliver’s truck in my driveway past midnight, talking and brushing fingers by accident. We swapped numbers and parted ways.

Months later, comfortably nestled in my dorm room and bored of the beer and raspberry Smirnoff-tinged make-outs and Axe bombs that plagued a coed floor in 2004, I was perusing Myspace when I came across Oliver’s page. It checked all my boxes at the time: hair pushed over one eye while plucking his guitar shoeless in an empty bathtub; dozens of comments from pretty girls telling him how cute he was; links to his band’s music that were basically nothing but analogies about the stars. I crafted the perfect casual-yet-interested message and sent it. He wrote back in seconds, and: “wow, guess what? I was coming home that weekend anyway, we should . . .”

We went to see a movie about old people who drank wine, and got high in the parking lot after. I kissed him first, cold smoke between our mouths as flies buzzed in the golden front porch lantern above us. He embodied the YA romance novels I’d read in the stacks of my library shifts. Everything I’d imagined walking up to me in high school study hall.

Over the first year we fell in love, there were small signs that things weren’t perfect. But they were normal, teenage things, I thought. Texts from an ex, an outstanding arrest warrant for pot possession, the inability to hold down a job because he could never miss band practice. They were thrilling things, even, considering I was the “good girl” at home, flanked by my younger twin sisters who were on the brink of discovering crippling drug dependencies. While they were sneaking out, stealing, and lying, guilt weighed on my shoulders to be the one who confirmed that my parents were good parents. That I wasn’t fucked up, so they hadn’t fucked up. Oliver let me break rules, breaking into abandoned houses and undressing on rooftops. I’d never been stared at that way. I’d never been touched that way. He’d brag to his dirtbag friends about how smart I was, then lock the bathroom door at parties and cover my mouth with his.

My sisters’ drug journeys got darker, and every time one of them overdosed, or cut herself and wound up in the hospital, Oliver was my escape. To rumpled sheets and DVD collections and swirling smoke. We did all the things that people in love do, like Julia Roberts said in Closer. We were dramatic about it, cutting our fingers and pushing our blood together and promising each other everything.

The darkness that bounced between us was like theater: it was exciting and all-consuming, but never real. It never occurred to me that it was rooted in real anger for him. Why would I want someone with no darkness? No depth? It would be boring.

He came from a huge family of Christian homeschoolers, and I grew to love his little sisters like they were my own. And he was expected to watch them, since he still lived at home, so we took them to the mall—and to minigolf the day I took my first Plan B pill. He rubbed my back the whole time, jumping over benches and miniature windmills to get me water and ice cream when I felt woozy.

We traded family vacations, him untying my bikini top in his family’s outdoor beach shower in North Carolina, and me pulling his hand to sneak into the basement of my family’s Cape Cod rental. Covered in sand and Corona-buzzed, we pretended like my college graduation wasn’t looming and that I’d have to make a choice in the ramp-up of a recession where paid jobs were a myth.

When I decided to move to New York City after college to work for free, writing about mascara and punk bands, there wasn’t a wisp of an invitation for him to come with me. Maybe somewhere I knew, or felt, like he couldn’t follow me into adulthood. And he seemed to just know it, despite the tearful late-night whispers about his dreams, our future child laying in a field of flowers. It was so outlandish, despite how fervent and connective our relationship had been. He thought we’d get married?

He helped my dad pack the car and drove, squished between a broken suitcase and a floor lamp, to move me into the four-story walk-up in Greenpoint one scorching day in August. He unpacked boxes for me, then rode back upstate with my parents, the backseat far roomier. I made no promises about when I’d see him again, and I thought I was the monster. I was the heartless one. Maybe I was. I was one who left.

The next time a sister overdosed, I came home and called him, like pushing indulgently into a bruise. He’d always been my escape, and I always welcomed the sensation of melting into something warm and soft and a little bit inappropriate. I knew he was dating someone else, and yet . . . I just didn’t care. I pulled off our T-shirts in the parking lot of a Motel 6 behind the closed-down dollar movie theater.

“Stay,” he whispered, and I didn’t know if he meant my body, then, or me, forever.

I didn’t.

Years passed and I heard rustlings that he wasn’t doing well. A cocaine habit, maybe, getting kicked out of his parents’ house. Voices from my past felt the need to update me from time to time. And despite the fact that I’d mostly moved on, was working for a mediocre salary, and lightly dating, I had dreams that he’d show up all moppy-headed with a guitar on my rat-scattered Bushwick front stoop. Then the whispers of “cocaine” turned to “heroin,” and the dreams stopped. Because that exact thing seemed to ruin things I cared about, and I couldn’t add another looming statistic to my fever dreams.

All that and yet—when my dad got sick, I called him. It wasn’t even to press the bruise again—I was already with the man who’d become my husband. If Oliver was gasping for air below deep, churning water, this man was a cool fountain that never ran out. I knew it would last.

I just called him because he’d loved my father. Maybe I wanted to make time feel like it did before I knew my dad would die.

His face was drawn and his eyes dead and after, my sisters told me the rumors were true about him. I was, yet again, staring heroin in the face. When Oliver and I hugged goodbye, it would be the last time. But it wouldn’t be the last time we spoke.

Crouched in a stairwell, I answered the unknown number, knowing it was him. He’d moved to another state with that girl, and his cracked voice was syrupy, as if I couldn’t see through it. As if I’d never been manipulated by a heroin addict before. As if I hadn’t walked into pawn shops to see full walls of my belongings before. His girl had kicked him out, he needed twenty dollars for groceries. My number came to him in a dream, he said. I said I was sorry and hung up. Then sobbed against the concrete because I’d lost yet another person to the identical razor-cold demon that was drug addiction.

Which was why I wasn’t surprised to hear that he was in jail. I assumed it was drugs or burglary, something I could recognize. Something where you could still be a good person. Part of me even thought it was my fault. How ego-bruised I was, imagining he’d been so heartbroken about me for so long that he turned to the needle. He had, but that wasn’t what locked him up. I wouldn’t find that out for two years.

My sister sent me the link via Facebook Messenger, with a gossipy note as if she were telling me some celebrity couple had called it quits. The local news article would be replicated globally within twenty-four hours by the likes of Cosmo, the Daily Mail, and many more just like them. His brave little sister allowed the trial to be recorded and publicized, while she read a letter to him confronting him of his years-long sexual abuse.

All the years we’d been together.

Her lower lip quivered as she stood strong and vulnerable, her paper crumpled as she told him he would pay for what he did to her. Her family behind her in a stoic line, faces I once considered so close to me. Oliver’s face was bloated and pale, the buttons of his jail uniform barely containing whatever sickness was seeping out. It had been years since I’d seen him. The ugliness from the inside was finally making an appearance. An ugliness and a sickness I’d seen as average teen darkness—my brain never once thought something like this could be possible.

He pled guilty and was rightfully sentenced to thirty-two years in prison.

I understand why people have trouble believing victims—why some flat-out refuse it. Why wives stand at podiums behind lecherous husbands, and why groups of teens stand up for lacrosse players. Why dads write passionate letters about lost scholarships. Because the second I watched that video, my brain began to immediately try to figure out why.

He must’ve been abused by someone and never told anyone.

Had he turned to drugs because of crippling guilt?

Who was this person I’d let inside me and my life for so long?

It’s impossible to believe that your truth, your experience, your love, could have been completely and totally skewed and warped behind recognition. My dreamy, gritty love story was what? My formative sexual experiences, my first “I love you” . . . what were those if he was hurting a child at the exact same time? My dream love story paralleled her absolute nightmare.

I can see how, for those people, it might be easier to say, “She lied.”

But she didn’t. They don’t. There was a small voice in my head that said, “No, he couldn’t have done that.” But the next voice said, “But he did. Because she said so.” And I knew that was the correct voice. And here she was, and that was when the memories returned to me. How timid she was among a gaggle of rambunctious kids. Later, her seizures. His anger that was directed at his parents; and yet, it never occurred to me he was so angry he would take it out in such a sick way on someone he should have protected. Did I miss something? A glance? A moment where I could have discovered what was going on and helped to stop it?

I didn’t know how to talk about what I’d learned. My husband and I had just moved into a new apartment together and had guests for the weekend. It was a bright, early spring morning and we had breakfast to make. Smiles to put on our faces. I couldn’t share the horrific thing I’d learned that colored years of my life in a gruesome light. How do you tell people you loved a monster?

“Thank God you didn’t get hurt too,” an old bandmate of his said to me, when the messages from friends from that time period began to roll in.

And it was true. Never once was anything nonconsensual. Which almost makes me feel sicker, the stark parallel between the loving relationship I got and the horrific one she was forced to endure.

I’ve written unsent letters to him, over and over, all sounding foolish. All left on my desktop because I don’t actually want to hear from him. Trying to process it, figure out how to wrap it up into the history of my life. How to keep it about her, her story. Sickness spirals outward, to every family member and every person who ever found affection for him.

What does it mean, that I chose him? That I loved him so much?

Did you love me? Does it matter?

Am I disgusting?

Why did I waste so many years on you?

Who even were you in the first place?

All that and yet, I know it’s nothing compared to her devastation. A psychic once told me you take on pain from other people, that the dark, sick energy that shifted in the rooms I also slept in is inside me. That it’s her story, but the feelings, the pain, the sickness, will always live under my fingernails and brush against the pulsating of my veins. Transferred trauma. I’ll never stop running through each moment I was with her, desperately searching for unspoken requests for help I was too in love to catch.

It’s been years since this news broke, and I still hold a distrust inside my body for her and for my inability to see what was going on. I research stories about the wives of serial killers, and am grateful that whatever voice told me to go to New York alone, did so. That we never married, we never had children, and that she was able to speak out and begin to work toward peace.

The sweet teen love stories haunt me—the roof of another boy’s car outside the library, sunsets on top of abandoned houses, spooky forests, his blood mixed with mine. I don’t know how to hold space for those memories I once found magical. My skin crawls when I write them because I wish they could’ve remained beautiful. It took a long time for my body to stop romanticizing those memories.

He’s out there, somewhere, in a cell. He isn’t dead. And if that chills every rushing drop of blood in my body, I can’t imagine how she feels. As my life propels forward, I find myself forever rewinding, looking for a hint, a time travel moment where I could make it make sense. Where I could still have this perfect teenage love story, where she could have grown up without the intimate prickle of a very deep fear and lack of safety. Where it never happened.

I’m not sure what it means, to love someone so deeply who turns out to be so sick. What loving teenage monsters does to us. They lurk, and hold secrets, and very occasionally get what they deserve. All we can do is keep our eyes open, and try our hardest to seek out what’s real and where we can stay safe.

-Lyz Mancini

Lyz Mancini is a writer living in Catskill, New York. She is a beauty and lifestyle copywriter for brands like Clinique and Thirdlove, and has written personal essays for Slate, XOJane, Bustle, and Huffington Post. She is a Pitch Wars 2020 alum and is participating in Tin House Winter Workshop 2022. She is represented for her fiction by Victoria Marini of Irene Goodman Literary Agency. Find her on Twitter: @lyzasterous and on Instagram: @lyzaster