I have told a few people the truth about Seventh, but I don't think I told anyone here, well on here, but how does one begin to tell anyone about your deepest secret. I may have already said too much on here and my lousy memory does not recall. The truth of the matter is that it is nothing illegal. Nothing. But it could have been.
When I met her she was 12 and a kindred soul to me, for I saw in her something all of her teachers never saw, depression. What were those signs that said to me that she was depressed was that she spent her lunches often away from other people, that she frequently changed her hair colour and that she did not smile often. Hair colour changes is not really a biggie for most girls, but she chose to go black and she wore black, again not a big thing, but that she was alone self ostracizing herself made me watch her.
I was an EA for a kid with Muscular Dystrophy, so I was tied to where he wanted to eat lunch so I only saw her on occasion. The next year the Maternity leave I was filling in for was over and I had to switch jobs so I was not going to see her again and that was fine, as I was not her teacher, she was not my responsibility and that is just the way things go. I was walking down the street and I had a chance encounter with her. Things like that happen sometimes in the city and you have chance encounters once or twice. She ambushed me and gave me a big hug in public and I could not reciprocate. Surprise, one. She was a child and I was an adult, two. And three I was conscious that I had a professional relationship to think about and hugging little girls would have been a bad move, three. She told me later that she was experimenting and she considered me safe.
As chance would have it, since I was not a permanent EA, Educational Assistant, I was on a short term contract until they found someone permanent. So after two months I was gone and unemployed again, just in time to step back into Seventh's school when a different EA decided to leave with no notice, there is another long story there I might one day impart. This time I was going to be following two Autistic children during class rotation. They had a core class with a Special Ed teacher and a few classes with another class like music and science. As chance would have it, this class was the class that Seventh was in.
I tried to keep aloof from her, because I have had some experience with young girls and crushes. Why is it that I get young girls forming attractions with me and not girls that I can actually legally see? Turns out that the rules were actually in my favour. The law at that time said that the age of consent was 14, modified that people with power over them it was 18, teachers were considered people of power, EAs were not.
I did not have to monitor the child with MD now, but part of my duties included lunch monitor, so I was outside and in the lunch hall every day and very often, Seventh would find me. We would talk often. We were friends. The end was in sight too, I was getting ready to go to Teacher's College and she was getting ready to go to High School so I knew that this friendship was not going to last, so it was safe.
When the last day came she showed me what she had done on the weekend, pierced her tongue. And I was a little worried, you see there are four dangerous behaviors for young children and if any one of them are present, the likelihood that others would be present. One does not make a self destructive child but a few of them should be considered reasons to watch them. The behaviors are changing hair colour, body modification outside of cultural norms, drug and alcohol experimentation early and early sexual experimentation. So she had just turned 14 on the weekend and she was changing her hair colour frequently, she was piercing her tongue and my thoughts were, "what else is she doing?"
Not something that I should be concerned about and I actually brought up my concerns for her mental health with her teachers, but they were more concerned that she wore loose blouses with deep necklines that slightly exposed her breasts, but really if they were really concerned about that they should have tightened up the dress code of the teachers, as they were really great role models in that category, not to mention pop culture.
Anyways it was the last day of school and I was never going to see her again. She asked me for my email address. I said no, really I did. She asked me why, and I told her that it was inappropriate. And she told me that her other teachers were giving out their addresses. I still said no. Really. She pleaded with me and I wanted to keep in contact with her, because I was genuinely concerned for her and now other teachers were giving out their email addresses too; I relented.
Let me be clear where my moral compass lies. Lay. Everything always has to be in the open. I knew that talking to her was a fine line, but as long as I did not do anything, it was fine. I was grooming her. I did not know I was grooming her. I did not want to groom her, but the effects could be the same. I was talking with a child and I was being her outlet on her life and her problems and in a sense, a real sense she was giving me power over her life. At first though you have to understand that I was not interested in any of that. I was interested in not having a child suicide. I wanted to teach her things, I wanted to make sure that her life was better emotionally than mine.
Now that I think back on it I think that perhaps, the problem with talking to a teenage girl going though emotional depression is that when you become that vent, her vent, you receive all the bad and none of the good and there is a lot of bad in any teenage girl. So that Summer she told me that she was using Marijuana on a regular basis, that she was cutting herself and piercing herself on a daily basis. I also found out that her aunt had given her a vibrator and was using that too.
I wanted to hold her. I wanted to keep her safe. I wanted to fuck her too. I was falling in love with her and she lived just a few hundred meters away. I did not want to know where she lived, I did not want to have any temptation, but we chatted online every day, sometimes all day. The truth is, for me, the fastest way to my heart is through my mind and to do that you have to talk or chat or whatever. For me to start to have feelings for a fourteen year old I also had to build up an image of someone who did not exist.
Society was telling me that it was okay to have sex with her. The mandatory Law class in Teachers College said that it was okay to have sex with minors as long as they were not your students and never were. And what I got from her is that she was desperate to loose her virginity and if I had been around, she would with me. I fought my instincts, which told me to have sex with her, and I shut her down every-time it came up. She was going to run away to be with me, she told me that she would book a bus trip to cross the country to be with me and I told her if she did I would have to drop her off at the local police station and then kiss my teaching career goodbye.
You see I thought that I owed it to her, if I really loved her that she have every opportunity to have an informed opinion. Part of me wishes that I had fucked her as soon as I was able and that she did runaway with me and that I was able to groom her into the person I wanted, and to be sure I could have. But if I had, I told myself then she would never be the person who she could be and that she would never really love me back. Also a lie, I wanted her to grow up and take the choice away from me, like every other little girl who has had a crush on me has.
Still we talked. She told me about here first sexual experience and within a week she wanted to meet with me. You can't dangle candy in front of me because I will try to eat it. I hardly talked to her and I did not want to be around her, I was afraid that I would do something or that she would. We still chatted and we met again months later and read Harry Potter on a bench in a park in the open. I then went off to Smallville and gave her a chance to grow up. I was desperately in love with her.
I did not want her to sleep with me on the basis of a crush, I am not sure if that was the right thing to do considering the results. Truth be told I am not sure I positive impact on her life. Let me tell you this, we were/are kindred spirits, we are soul-mates in a way, a very dark way. People don't normally have long term depression, this is what it looks like to the depressed person. The wold looks like it does for you, except if you look off to the left a little bit, you see a a deep tapping hole. The hole is deep, deeper than the deepest mineshaft and it calls to you. It whispers and tells you that your life would be better if you just jumped much better. It is like when you approach a dangerous situation, like a cliff top or a subway platform and you hear the whisper that tells you to jump and the urge and it frightens you so you step back from the brink. When you live with this abyss gently just to the left of you, life is a struggle. I had lived with the hole for most of my life, and she had only just started. The older you get the smaller the hole gets, you gain a bit of control, but occasionally it is just as big as when you were small. When you live by the hole you do things to make you forget about the hole, some people do anyways, I just lived with my feet dangling over the side or walking its slippery slope. People fill this void, with cutting and self mutilation and sex, anything to distract them from that hole. Do you understand? The hole calls to you. I wish I answered its call decades ago, when I might have been able to do something.
In away I am happy for her that she found away to block off the hole without me, but I wish she had just filled the void with me, instead of joining a cult.
Seven put herself into situations where she was attacked. Not physically, precisely. She exposed herself to innocent sexual behaviour, like one night stands with friends taking their virginity and such, innocent stuff. She also got herself into situations where she was raped. What I mean is well she put her self in situations where men could take her and have sex with her without her consent, sexual cutting. I see it as doing things to distract yourself from the hole. She has been raped by three different people, but she never saw it as rape but just as sex. Technically, she was raped more often. She had a boyfriend that played mental power games with her and she had a boy friend who knowingly infected her with a permanent sexually transmitted disease, because it did not kill you or injure you so you did not have to mention it. And she was seduced by a cult.
Cults don't want you to have the tools to judge them rationally. They want people that can not give their informed consent. They want people like Seven who are damaged and can't defend themselves. She was constantly in a deep cloudy haze of marijuana smoke, that numbed her mind and joined up. They promised her that everlasting happiness was just five to ten years away when Jesus Christ was going to walk the earth and chose her, if she followed these simple rules. And with that her hole disappeared.
Life in her cult was good for not looking at her void, but bad in every other way. She ignored her potential. She is the smartest person I have ever met, truly gifted, if only she would have applied herself. Not applying herself got her an easy pass into any university, but after a year of doing a cult inspired self directed Religious Studies, she dropped out. And she decided to devote herself to her cult.
After being in for long enough they told her that she had to purge all distractions from her life. Marijuana went out the window, alcohol went out the window sex went out the window, decorations went out the window, if it wasn't practical it was not allowed. She had a bed and a bible, what more did she need. Never mind that her religious leaders had cars and luxury goods and houses and probably felt good tithing the amount they earned in a minimum wage job, never-mind that that was twenty years ago and they did not work for less than fifty grand a year, probably more than one hundred, she tithed all her spare money and was mad to feel guilty with every misstep, like eating ice cream. She is a sensualist, she liked new sensations and new things, but now they made her feel guilty.
So that winter I had some time and I was close by and I decided to try something, I still loved her, for me the feelings never go away. MPTR had her chance with me and I had not met MagicEyes yet. I had tried my program of unrestricted sex to try to make my relationship with MPTR meaningless and failed. But, there was Seven. I was not going to do anything, I just wanted her to try to explain it to me, her cult, because I knew that she could not. Because Cults seem crystal clear in retrospect, but when you try to explain them, you can't because they don't make sense. So I asked her to explain it to me. She couldn't, but I got to spend time with her. I did not touch her, but I sat next to her and watched videos that explained everything, but nothing. I did not ask the right questions though. The right questions were: Why? That is always the best question. She told me that she could not explain how it worked. I should have said why can't you, you are the smartest person I know, why can't you explain it?
There was a point where I could have plucked her. Plucked her sounds repulsive. What I mean was that we got close again, by proximity and because as I said we are kindred spirits in ways few can know. You see love is not what people think it is. People think that there is one true love out there. Out there there is one true love, a happily ever after, it is just there are hundreds of them, thousands of them, in fact the you probably have met ten of them and did not know it. You just have not spent the time to get to know them, so you never knew it. I had convinced Seven to come home with me to Smallville for the weekend. This was not a ploy to seduce her, it was a ploy to get her to have fun with me. I had told her what we were going to do. I was going to take her star watching in the snow, stars are brighter in the winter time. I was going to teach her how to drive and let her drive in a large parkinglot. I was going to introduce her to some friends, including The Witch. I was going to take her out to a restaurant or two. I was going to keep her in the second bedroom, I have one. She asked me what I would have done if she snuck into my bed, and I told her nothing, nothing the first time it happened. I am not sure she believed me, but I meant it.
She had agreed to come and as I was leaving her apartment, I felt it. The way her eyes looked at me and the way her body moved, I knew that if I wanted to, I could have kissed her. I wanted to, but I didn't and I left. I didn't do it because every time she was in a similar situation, the boy she was with took the kiss and more and I thought it was important to let her know I was different.
She did not go away with me that weekend. She went to her church and her cult members told her that she was being tempted by the devil and her soul was in jeopardy. And she forbade me to talk to her and to ever come and see her.
Everytime I was in the city again I asked if I could see her, and she told me that she could not see me alone. And that she never wanted to be around me again.
But she calls me. She calls me when she has slipped off the path, she has slept with another man. She calls me when she sees the void just off to the left. She wants to know that I will come and save her should she need it. She wants to know that if all else should fail, I would catch her; I would. Truth is if she called me again and told me her world was falling apart, I would be there at her side and I hate it that I can't see in to the future to know when I need to be there to catch hold of her. When she calls, I am never there, right there to catch her. I don't know if I am caught in her web as a victim, a willing victim, but I know that I would rush to her aid.
So she called me last night. She called me to ask if I would still catch her if she fell. I wanted to say no, not after the way that you treated me, but I said yes, my Dark Little Secret whom I love.
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