and sadder than I had ever known. What started off as after-school tutoring – I desperately wanted to be awriter, and the teacher had gone to Columbia University and studied at Oxford, was worldly and had his own poetic streak – escalated into meeting secretly at night, passing erotically charged notes back and forth in his classroom, and my teacher giving me pornographic images and telling me that was what he imagined it would be like when we could be together.
Another girl was doing my hair. I was in a blue-and-white-striped summer dress, red lips, a strand of hair coyly surrounding my face. The teacher was watching me from a few feet away. If I reached out, I could touch his khakis. Our eyes locked. I looked at him, full of lust and longing. I felt so strong, so sexy, so powerful. “I am your Lolita,” I turned the phrase over in my mind and mouth without moving my lips, trying to say it all in my gaze.
After a year of keeping us a secret, I chafed under his thumb and broke the relationship off. It was ugly and messy, filled with long letters of apology from him, promises that things would be different. For the first 10 years afterwards, I thought of it simply as a bad break-up with a shitty ex. One of many. But then, at 30, I began to teach.
This is gonna be a movie too right