Dark Valley

Zoë Sprankle

A week after my father killed himself, I let a boy fondle my breasts in silence by the beach. There wasn’t much eye contact or humanness to it, just him all over me and me numb all over. At seventeen I was so ahead, and so behind. There may have been music playing, but all I can remember are the sounds of water slapping the shore and his shallow staccato breath drumming in my ear. Together, we shared a secret code of restless oxytocin exchange, an agreement of horny and heartbroken teenage souls moving together along the New Hampshire coastline. Sometimes grief looks like lust.

It’s 2007 and I’m eight years old. We can’t leave the bagel shop until Dad’s finished with his coffee. I love this place because they slab on the cream cheese really thick and there are always so many kinds of people to watch. Dad orders me a plain bagel with plain cream cheese. Plain, plain. Plain Jane. Sitting across from me, scratching his bearded chin, he stares into his coffee like it’s a wishing well. Something is off. Something about the way his forehead scrunches and his eyes look all stormy behind his glasses.

“We have to talk about something important,” he says.

I’m in trouble. I must be. I don’t remember doing anything bad. I don’t even remember yesterday.

“It’s about Vanessa Hudgens,” he says.

Ever since watching Vanessa Hudgens in High School Musical in a dingy motel with my parents on a road trip to Washington, DC, I’ve been obsessed with her. In our family, we mostly watch Dad’s movies and listen to Dad’s music and read Dad’s books, but Vanessa is all mine. I’m an only child, and she becomes the older sister I search for on the cover of Tiger Beat magazine up and down the supermarket aisles. I dress as her for my HSM-themed birthday party, Gabriella Montez in her little orange cardigan. I tack her and Emma Watson’s headshots above my bed and kiss their paper cheeks goodnight. My Webkinz password is VanessaAnneHudgensLover08. I can barely breathe when I see her, live on the HSM tour, at my distance the size of an eyelash. I’m in eight-year-old love. My first taste of all-consuming infatuation. And if I’m lucky, maybe one day, when I reach big-girl age, she’s the kind of person I could be.

Dad takes a long sip of his coffee but no liquid seems to go down. “Her inappropriate photos were leaked to the tabloids,” he says.
I feel my throat constrict and my heartbeat quake.

Dad slides back in his chair and looks at me. Straight on, without blinking. His coffee is still full and steaming. From the corner of my eye I watch high schoolers gather in packs, sloshing around iced mochas and drooping backpacks. There are so many people around, but really it’s just me and Dad. It’s always just me and Dad.

“What inappropriate photos?”

“Naked pictures,” he says.

“Why’d she take naked pictures?”

“Probably to give to someone she trusted.”

In my mind, the pedestal I’d placed Vanessa on crumbled like pound cake. I couldn’t believe she would do something like that. I thought nothing of who could have possibly leaked the photos. Vanessa was eighteen, and eighteen meant grown-up. Grown-ups should know better.

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“Her career will probably go down the drain.” Dad looks at me in a way that I know my eyes better stay still and steady on his. “Promise me you’ll never make a mistake like that.”

I’m in the third grade and childhood feels infinite. I know nothing of how middle school boys will call me “mosquito-bite boobies.” Or how I will have a slobbery bowling-alley first kiss that leaves me sobbing in my mother’s car, fearing my father’s reaction. How this will mark the first of many impulsive confessions to him while my mother watches in silence from the sidelines, fearful in her own right of my father’s temper and control. My mother will be the one helping me insert the tampon the first time I bleed, the one rubbing my back once I learn that there’s now so much between me and my girlhood. I’m too young now to know how soon imaginary play will decay and mature into rumors and cliques and senior boys with beards who look at me like I’m simultaneously a toddler and a toy. How soon I’ll be touched. How soon I’ll lose something I’m supposed to keep, to someone I think I trust.

I’m thirteen, and for my birthday I’m given access to a Facebook account, but directed to accept friend requests only from people I’ve met in real life. Before Dad’s chronic pain and depression creeps in and he applies for disability, he works as a computer teacher at an elementary school in Maine. He loves technology, makes use of it like magic, but warns me often of its seedy, awful underbelly. He teaches me how it can open up worlds, but to never show too much of myself in it.

In his usual contradictory way, though, he never seems to practice what he preaches. He meets fellow teachers and colleagues through Second Life, where he flies his avatar over pixelated rivers and plains. I stand in his office doorway and watch my father play my father, with matching goatees and circular glasses. When my best friend posts a photo of the two of us in bikinis by the neighborhood pool, Dad throws a fit. There’s screaming and hot sticky tears and my mother trying to calm us down. I’m instructed to tell my friend to either remove the photo or crop my prepubescent body out. She takes the photo down, and I know a part of her is angry. But my father’s smothering equates to love. And what an all-knowing love it is.

I’m fifteen and have finally reached big-girl age, with all its glory of big-girl privileges, and a new slew of consequences to go along with them. I grow into my mosquito-bite boobies, and the boys who gave me the nickname now request pictures of the very parts of me they once mocked. On Snapchat, they send me photos of their dimly lit faces and say nothing. I respond with a smirk and say nothing right back. Then they ask for everything.

It seems no guys are tit guys. Tit pictures are easy—you just pull down your shirt, contort your collarbone, hold your breath, and flex. Show them the dark valley of your cleavage. But never your nipples. You have weird nipples. Tit pictures are easy, and maybe they know that, and that’s why they’re all ass guys. They make you work for it. Like they find something arousing in your effort. In the way they know you’ll have to unravel yourself from under your covers and peel yourself away from all that warmth to turn on your bedside light. How you’ll tiptoe your way to your dresser, the one your mother painted white when Dad’s pain got worse and you moved from Maine to New Hampshire. There, inside your big-girl drawer in your big-girl dresser, you’ll find a nice pink pair, lacy and clean, one your dryer hasn’t torn to shreds and your body hasn’t stained with blood. You’ll get back into bed, over the covers now. You’ll flip the phone upside down, wrist twisted, grinding the imaginary below. With your stomach sucked in you’ll make yourself into mounds. Peaks and valleys of a person. Send.


The boys reply sooner to pictures of your ass than of your face. The tiny response box awaits you like a present. You open it with a tap of your thumb. The boy hasn’t moved an inch. Half of his same face, in the same expression, in the same dim light. Nice, he says. You exhale and get back under the covers, rubbing the soles of your feet together like you used to do to give yourself comfort as a little girl. Only a few seconds pass before he sends another little message box your way. More? You’ve turned him on, now finish the job.

Dad’s asleep in the next room, his pajamas for the next night tucked under his pillow like he’s done since he was a young boy. He’d kill you if he knew. He’ll be alive for another two years. He never wanted you to get a Snapchat in the first place, for this very reason. You precious thing.

I’m twenty and I’ve fallen in love. She has a tiny mole above her upper lip and her hair is always tangled. She looks a bit like me, and when we go to her family’s house on the Cape, a woman at the beach mistakes us for sisters. She’s an Aries. She’s still in love with her ex. She’s studying abroad in the fall. She’s breaking my heart. I lose my appetite and gain a kind of control. In the mornings, I eat veggie egg bites from Starbucks that burn the roof of my mouth. If she hasn’t texted me by noon, I skip lunch entirely. If I feel faint on the train ride home, I eat a protein bar, the kind that looks like a mushed-up brick of shit. I send her naked pictures on Snapchat so she won’t forget me while she’s away. I just want her to be happy.

My dad has been dead for four years. In that time, I do everything that would have made him roll over in his grave. Metaphorically, of course, as he had his body burned. Ash and powder, scattered in the woods of Maine or wherever else my mother chose to fling him.

In college, more boys fondle me and I let them. Subconsciously, the code has shifted. If I let them touch me, I know they’ll have to stick around and hear my grief. I perch on their twin beds with my knees to my chest and tell them the story I’ve separated myself from. I watch their faces contort as I manipulate them like a puppeteer. There are condoms in the trash can. I convince myself that lust can combat grief. Everything my father had warned me of, shielded me from, and denied me, I now carry out in deferred acts of rebellion. I feel invincible, when what I really am is dissociative. The present seems to exist in the past, while my youth finally catches up with me. My mother gives me his remaining dust in a slim silver tube in a black velvet sleeve. I never touch his ashes, because there’s something shivery about the tactile component, how my father’s residue might get trapped under my fingernails and wind up in my mouth.

I’m twenty-four and my partner and I wake up shirtless. Peaks and valleys of two people together in bed. It’s eight in the morning and we have Keurig coffee with oat milk creamer and scrambled eggs. Then they put on their green-rimmed glasses and get to work at their desk.

I go on Instagram as an unconscious ritual. I respond to friends’ DMs and decide to check my message requests. I don’t usually do this, because they’re mainly a wasteland of sugar daddy offers and obscure brands that love my vibe. But today, I do. An all-black profile picture with a gibberish username has sent me a message. Hey, you’re not the one posting these, are you? I click the image, which is blurred and marked sensitive. And there I am, looking back at me. There’s my old nose ring and apathetic smirk. There’s the clear shower curtain behind me and the cracked blue-white tile from my old college apartment. There’s my perky tits and shriveled pink nipples. There I am, all young and pale and plain. Plain Jane. There I am, bad.


I ask the anonymous username who they are and how they found the pictures. They tell me they’re just some random dude from Australia who often reverse-image searches women he finds online. I stare at my naked body on the screen and try to remember who I’d sent it to in the first place. I remember my first love. The photo I’d sent while she was away across the sea. Her tangled hair in my tangled hair. I look at twenty-year-old me and see only ribs. I am gaunt. Gray. There I am, sick.

I block the random Australian dude. I realize my Snapchat has been hacked somewhere in rural Texas. In my partner’s bed, I think of my father’s teachings on internet safety. Always change your passwords. I call my mother. I tell her my nudes are somewhere on the dark web. She snorts a bit and tells me not to worry.

I hang up the phone while my partner attempts to find the photo and take it down. We scroll past other naked girls who’ve been posted without their consent. And then we stop. I realize I don’t care. I’m crying not from the invasion of privacy or fear of exposure, but for the person in the photo. For her slight smile and tightly clasped hands. For her locked-away grief and dissociative spells. For her hunger and emptiness. For her belief that another person will make her whole.

I remember the day in the bagel shop, and Vanessa Hudgens. When I think about it now, I realize she was my first crush. When I think about it now, I realize eighteen is so young. I remember my family’s old house in Maine. My father sits on the couch. I’m standing on the carpeted staircase with my hands gripping the banister. There we are, suspended in a dramatized tableau. I’m pleading with him, as I so often do. I want to date some boy whose name will soon have no significance. My father tells me I’m growing up too fast. That I know nothing of feelings or of wanting or of love. I scream from a deep place in my diaphragm, “IT’S MY LIFE!” My father looks at me like he doesn’t know me. His mouth barely moves when he says, calmly and certainly, “No, it’s not.”

I’m twenty-five and walking to work as a hostess at an upscale restaurant in Tribeca. Canal Street is full of big men slinging counterfeit bags, pawning off Prada and Chanel and Look at you go, mama. Some of the men have their shoes off and pray on coarse, royal blue rugs. Others barter with tourists or God or women’s clavicles. Huge bags of weed bounce on their hips.

I’m so exposed in this mock middle school hallway. I’m wearing a long, low-cut dress with a slit up the side of my left leg. My father would kill me if he saw me now. In my head I remind my dear dead dad that it’s eighty-two degrees and humid. I remind him, This is my commute. He responds in a muted fury, Well, then cross the fucking street and get a car home, and while you’re at it, why don’t you put on twenty-two sweaters? Now he’s going on about the air quality, and how I really shouldn’t have a job in Tribeca, or walk anywhere alone, or drink alcohol, or trust a soul, unless it’s one he’s specifically scouted for me.

I make my way to the train and flick sweat away from below my eyes. It stings like tears. The subway cars in the middle are always the coolest. There’s something about the artificial crispness that transports me to my parents’ room in the summertime, the only one in the house with air conditioning. What a privilege to join them, in their protective icebox. I always wanted to sleep between them, safe from all the bad.
I make it home from my day. I assure my father I’ll survive another tomorrow. In the mirror, I move. I stand naked and examine the stretch marks on my hips and the pout in my lower stomach. In bed, I rub the soles of my feet together. My father is dust, and I am so real.

I am nine years old and I’m too afraid to sleep alone. On Friday nights, Mom works late and it’s just me and Dad. He prepares frozen pizza and we watch an old film of his choice. The evening inevitably ends in a fight. A fight that no eight-, nine-, or ten year old should be having with her dad. I’m too afraid to sleep alone. My Dad’s body presses hard against my bedroom door as I kick and claw at it, trying to get out. My mother comes home and is instructed to stay away from her bad girl. Keep your voice down or the neighbors are gonna call the cops.

In family therapy, we recount the screamfests to a woman in a sleek black chair. It is there that my mind goes blank. Where had all the screams come from in the first place? Dad tells a version of that night I’m not sure I remember. A version I’m not sure is real.

What had I done so wrong, anyway? But I do remember that the beginnings of those Friday nights are all bliss. Dad makes the basement into a mock drive-in movie theater, and the first time he shows me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he fashions a handmade golden ticket and hides it in a Hershey Bar. He tells stories and plays guitar. He tucks his pajamas under his pillow. What a comfort he could be.

I’m no more than a few weeks old, wearing a little red onesie, curled against my father’s bare chest. The photo sits on a shelf above my bed in my Brooklyn apartment. I wipe dust from the frame and see this tactile version of us. I prefer it like that. That way I can turn the photo over in my hands and swipe my finger against a face, not a screen.

In the photo, my eyes are fastened tight, cheeks squished, little fists balled up like flower buds. My father was usually behind the camera, but here, he holds me. In his trademark round glasses, he’s smiling so wide, holding this tiny thing he had a hand in making. I’m scrunched against his dark beard. He has a look of almost disbelief that I’m his. A part of him seems to wish I’ll stay that way forever. A part of me believes that if I do, I could be the thing to save him.