Fangirls
There’s a man inside your house.
The man has no face.
The man has a name –
But it keeps changing.
It’s just you and him and the deep dark woods.
You could put on the light.
You could leave the house.
You could call someone.
But you don’t.
You close your eyes and you make the shape of him in your mind.
You wait for him to fill it.
This is what you have to do –
If you want to see him.
If you want it enough.
And you do.
Oh, you do.
Rosalie, the Fiancée
Once upon a time, a girl fell in love with a boy. That’s the story, right? The story everyone wants? That’s what they told me to want. I like to do what I’m told.
I first saw him on the TV news. There had been a manhunt. That’s what every woman is on, right? That’s what we joke about over Cosmopolitans, which at the bar here is just cranberry and triple vodka, but we order them because that’s what they drink on Sex and the City , and at least it comes in a triangle glass. A man hunt. We hunt with our tits and our lips, save the final kill for our pussies.
He was hot as fuck, sorry about it. Tall, strong-jawed, cheeks scooped out like young Johnny Depp. This black tumble of curls that fell over his dark eyes. Later they’d say that his teeth were rotting out of his mouth, that he didn’t wash in prison because he didn’t want a knife in his ass and so he stank. Later still I’d find out that was true, but every man is a project, isn’t he? Mouthwash helps.
Sitting there in the bar, Cosmo glass sweating in my hand, my girlfriends’ laughter already getting loose, the bar stool squeaking under my miniskirted ass, thinking why the hell have they got the news channel on, they should be showing a ball game, or an old black-and-white movie to make the place feel classier than it was, or a nature documentary, lions stalking gazelles, if the manager had a sense of humour, which she did not. Then he appeared, and all I could do was stare up at the TV. I wondered if this is how the Virgin Mary felt when the angel appeared to her. I swear I could hear a hallelujah chorus.
On-screen he was in dirty janitor’s overalls, wrists cuffed, top lip in a snarl. He knew exactly where the camera was, and he followed it with his gaze, looking right at me. His eyes arrowed straight into me. The news ticker tape described all the things he was accused of doing. I don’t pretend I didn’t know. I imagined him in a classic Hollywood pose, taking my face in his hand, the palm calloused from all the things he’s held down, pressed along my cheekbone. I’d sigh prettily and lean in. The tip of his thumb would push against my eye socket. My vision would burst into colours. I’d smell the blood caught under his thumbnail.
I thought of all the women he’d been with; the estranged wife who, the ticker tape said, was the reason he’d been caught. On that squeaky bar stool in a room smelling of beer and sex, I saw my future unspooling. All I needed in this world was his dark heart beating beside me in bed. It had beat beside his wife and she’d pretended she didn’t hear it, pretended she didn’t know. But he wouldn’t have to pretend with me.
I never went back to that bar. I didn’t need to hunt any more. I’m waiting out his sentence, just as he is, and every time I lie with him in that conjugal room with its polyester sheets and wicker basket of condoms, I hear his heart beat against mine and all I think is: I knew, I knew, I knew right from that first sight.
I know exactly who he is: the key that will unlock my most hidden parts. With him, I can be everything I want to be.
Bella, the Fan
I’m him. Not exactly him , but like him. No, screw that: better than him.
Because he’s old, and he’s in prison, which does sound kind of badass but actually I bet it smells of man farts and cheap cleaning fluid. Not unlike shop class at school. But more rapey.
My name is x_Jack_x_Switchblade_x. Cool, right? I mean, a little lame too, but I made the account two years ago and I can’t change it now. Anyways the girls like it. We play, me and the girls. Just online. There’s nothing wrong with it. We’re reading and writing, we’re using our imaginations, we’re working on our empathy skills. We should be able to present this shit as homework.
I’m the boy they want and can’t have – but online, all I want in the world is them. They know exactly who I am, what I’ve done, and I quirk a smile at them and say: hey. I see you and it’s the best thing they’ve ever heard because no one, fucking no one in their lives, actually sees them, and I talk to them like they’re the only person in the world.
Some girls have romantic saviour complexes. They know a boy is just a boy, that he’s soft as a marshmallow underneath and all he needs is a little love and understanding.
Sure, there are beasts – but all he needs is a beauty. He’ll see that true beauty in her, no matter how deep it’s hidden. Because he’s so deep , so dark , a misunderstood outcast, and they feel like outcasts too, so he’s the perfect boy to find solidarity with. All she needs to do is save him, and he’ll save her right back.
Some girls don’t want to save him. Asshole to the world, but good to his girl. Choke me, Daddy, I’m your princess. They think they’d be the exception – that everyone else would be killed, but the boy would see something special in her, would recognise right from the first glance that she is not like the others.
They’ll go on a glorious murder spree together like the Joker and Harley Quinn, go out in a hail of bullets like Bonnie and Clyde, die for love like Romeo and Juliet. Maybe if they got caught they’d cry that he’d forced her, manipulated her – but that would be bullshit. It was a willing desire.
For a while I thought that was funny, these totally standard girls, just like all the others, why would a killer think they were special? Like why wouldn’t theirs be the head in the fucking jar or the corpse raped until she rotted apart?
But then I figured it out.
Some girls, that’s what they want .
They want to be the head in the jar.
You can’t talk, can’t move, can’t get older, can’t make the wrong choice, can’t be too frigid or too slutty – just held, forever, at the moment of your most desirable, when someone wanted you so much that they’d kill for you. Imagine being so special, so precious, that the individual parts of you are worth saving.
A girl is at her most desirable when she stays young, doesn’t speak, stays nice and still so she can be looked at. What else are teenage girls told, except that they’re the most beautiful when they’re dead?
All girls want a murder boyfriend.
And he’s the perfect one.
We’ve all seen him on the news and the true crime sites and the social media rabbit holes. Those eyes, that hair, that smirk. Say what you want about him, but if he was less murdery he could’ve been on some teen drama show. It’s easy to fit into his skin.
I know exactly who he is: a manic pixie nightmare boy.
He’s the teen girl dream, so I can be too.
Claudette, the Ex-Wife
On my sixteenth birthday, no one paid attention to me. Including me. Everyone’s eyes were on the TV, where the news reported that another girl’s body had been found. Her name is as emotive to me as my own: Gabby Villeneuve. She was taken the week after her sixteenth birthday. She was a saint. If she wasn’t in life, she became one after she died. Beautiful, generous, high-achieving. Perfect in every way. It made sense that the killer would choose her. Anyone would choose her.
But every time I thought about Gabby Villeneuve, I couldn’t see her clearly, because a shadow fell across her face. The shadow of her killer.
I could already see him in my mind. He was strong, sexual, unswerving. He was virile; a lady’s man. His hair was thick and fell over his eyes. His lips were soft. His body was brawny and sinewy, like a welterweight boxer. He was cruel when people weren’t good enough. But that was okay, because I knew I could be good enough.
There are so many things you can be haunted by. When I was a little girl, I often imagined a winged black horse taking me away through the night. I think I’d heard someone say ‘nightmare’, and I knew a mare was a horse, so it made sense to me that nightmare meant a horse that came for you in the night. I told him that once. We were lying in bed, in that honeymoon time when you spend a lot of time in bed, and you love to put things in one another’s mouths, and every word that comes out of those mouths is surprising and magical to you. I told him about the horse, and I laughed a little, because I felt nervous and kind of silly, and I don’t know if I wanted him to laugh too. But he didn’t. He turned to me and sat up on his elbow with his chin in his hand and he looked right into my eyes – that was the thing with him, he could look at you like he was the only person in the world who truly saw you, and later I wondered if he looked at them like that, all those women, if that was the last thing they ever saw, and I think as last things go it’s not such a bad one, to be truly seen like that. He took me seriously. I don’t think men realise how much women need that. To be heard, and seen, and understood. He always did that. I’m not saying he was always good to women, but you can’t say he ignored us.
In return, he told me that when he was a little boy, he imagined unearthing a woman in the forest, finding her like treasure. I asked him if he’d got that from his mother reading him fairy tales, if he was thinking of Snow White in her glass coffin, or Sleeping Beauty woken with a kiss. I imagined him unearthing me from the darkness and the silence, of gazing at me in wonder and saying: oh my love, my precious thing. Were you waiting for me all that time? And I would say to him: yes, yes. He turned away from me then and said men didn’t have time for fairy tales. But I know that’s not true. If there was ever a fairy tale he knew inside out, it’s Beauty and the Beast . If neither of us had ever heard that story … if, if, if.
He didn’t kill Gabby Villeneuve. They never found who did that. But I often wonder, if not for her, and all the time I spent thinking about her – and more importantly, the man who chose her – would I have let him choose me?
I know exactly who he is: the beast from the fairy tale. But no matter how good I am, he will never change.
Beauty, the Prison Guard
It’s hard for a woman to be known for something she’s done. Mostly women aren’t remembered for anything at all, and if we do know their names it’s that they’re the wife or daughter or discarded fuck-toy of a more accomplished and famous man. They can ride on his coat-tails, but then they’re stuck behind him, trying to pretend he’s not farting in their faces.
There’s one more way for a woman to be known. She can be murdered by a famous man. The more elaborately, the better. Suzie Barbot. Jean Beaumont. Marie Prince. Gabby Villeneuve. Names we all know, and why? Because of him. The Pig King, so-called because parts of his victims were fed to … well, let’s just say it wasn’t a king. They never caught him. The faceless, ever-shifting man who haunted all our girlhoods. Would he come for us next? What would we do if he did? And did it even matter what we did, or said, or wanted, or were?
A lot of people think he’s the Pig King, but it was never proven. The only one he was convicted for, in the end, was the wife. Not even proven, and still he’s famous for it. Who do you know that’s affected so many people’s lives as him? People he’s never even met know his name, but he doesn’t know theirs. He doesn’t have to because they don’t matter. Why does he get to matter? Why does he get to matter, and I don’t?
I had so much potential, you know that? I was always top of my class in school. Graduated early. Studied psychology. I was going to be a criminal psychologist. Then I had to quit because they changed the terms of my scholarship. I applied for a correctional officer job, just temporarily. I thought – I have no idea why – that it might help me to move into my chosen field. I might not be strictly qualified to work with the inmates in a psychological capacity. But surely it would help, I thought. The more experience, the better. That was twelve years ago. And here I am. Here I fucking am.
And there he is. Known. Named. Seen. The primal terrors of sounds in the night, sharp knives and dark alleys, your own flesh turned to meat – distilled into a human being, a real live man, a horror with a heartbeat.
I think the most frightening thing about him is the nothingness. Not the shallow affect of the psychopath, and not the banality-of-evil ordinariness. It’s that there is simply nothing there. I have hours – hours – of recorded conversations with him, and let me tell you, he is one of the most tedious men I have ever met. The self-aggrandising, the victim complex, the circular logic, the repetition of the same tired old anecdotes. He holds back details of the murders like an eight-year-old with a secret den. I meet everything he says with wide-eyed absorption and he’s like a leaky tap, drip drip drip.
For a while the other inmates were calling him the Professor because he hung out at the library so much. He read all the law books he could get his hands on. He’s got this plan that he’s going to mount his own defence. This is all just so perfect, I couldn’t have planned it. I joined in, called him the Professor too. He’s an idiot, of course, or he wouldn’t have got caught; but I don’t want him thinking that. I want him thinking he’s smarter than everyone in here, including – especially – me. If he thinks I have the intelligence of a sponge, he’ll let me soak up everything I need.
I join in when they call me Beauty, too. I know it’s a joke. My looks were never my strength. But I prefer it that way. Everyone’s looks fade in the end, and I’ve seen what happens to women who rely on them too much. I’ve got something better than looks. I’ve got him.
My love is hard fact. It can be counted and measured. 343 newspaper clippings, 15 videos, 29 conversations recorded on my Dictaphone. A testament of devotion. Not devotion to him; God no. Devotion to myself, of who I should have been. Who I will be, because of him.
I know exactly who he is: the way to make my name mean something. And I won’t even have to die.
Bella, the Fan
We live in a nice place. My parents are comfortable and mostly ignore me. I’ve never been woken by gunshots or mugged in the twilight. The only violence here is the silent kind that happens behind every locked door and inside every girl.
Once I found a jar of baby teeth in my parents’ room, but I swear there were too many to be just mine. I wondered if they were my mother’s from when she was a kid.
Or I had a sibling a ways back who died or left. My parents are older so it’s possible.
It could be a serial killer’s trophies, for all I know. Wouldn’t that be a trip!
If I was alone with you , I type, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back. I would have to be restrained. In response, a tongue emoji. I knew she’d like that.
I think it’s true what they say, that he’s the Pig King. That means he’d already killed someone before I was born. Weird to think that. He’d lived a whole life before mine even started.
I could have known him when I was a kid. He could have been my uncle. He could have been my creepy neighbour. He could have been my babysitter’s boyfriend. He could have stuck his big hand down my little pink pyjamas when she was out of the room. He could have squeezed a soapy sponge over my little puss when I was in the bath. He could have looked at my tiny mouth and thought: yes.
He didn’t, obviously. No one paid me that kind of attention when I was a kid.
I want you to lock yourself in the bathroom , I type, and wait for me to come for you. And while you wait, you can come for me. Fire emoji, peach emoji, fire emoji.
The day I was born, the police were doing a fingertip search of the fields at the edge of town because Gabby Villeneuve had just been found. There were another three but she’s the main character.
She was the youngest and the prettiest, and she’d never done anything. The others, the papers said they were sex workers or they’d had a bunch of boyfriends. They’d been out late at night – but Gabby was snatched outside the library where she’d been staying late to do homework. She literally couldn’t be more perfect. I bet she had half a Best Friends heart keychain on her backpack.
I will never let anyone else have you , I type. You are mine, body and soul, forever. I will take you by force if I have to.
She’s past emojis now, just key smashing, akskskdkfjansnf .
When I was little, we learned about the Vikings in school, and then we played at raping and pillaging all summer. We’d heard the word ‘rapier’ and we thought that’s what it was. Cutting stuff up with a long swishy sword.
I sign off with an eggplant emoji and a tongue emoji. I think she’s already gone. She doesn’t like to digitally snuggle.
I don’t want to be a man. Or. I don’t know. Do I? I want to have what men have. Not a dick necessarily but the rest of it. Though a dick would be okay.
I think I just want to be someone else. And if I have to be him – that’s better than being myself.
He’s a suit that I wear, and you know what? I’ll outgrow him. But that’s okay – there are a million guys out there, and most of them are just scaffolding anyway.
I’ll find another hollow man, and make him real.
Claudette, the Ex-Wife
He didn’t kill me. He’s in prison for killing me, except I didn’t die. I think, for him, that’s the worst part.
He used to call me his doll. It’s funny that we think dolls are for little girls, when it’s what most men want. A life-size plaything, tender and tentative, graceful and girlish. Four poseable limbs and a wide, wide smile. Little girls love their dolls, but that’s nothing to how he loved me.
Real love, real deep down to the bone love, love right in the guts and the marrow of a person – that kind of love hurts . Why wouldn’t it? What’s the point of anything if you don’t really feel it? If it doesn’t dig its claws deep, you could just shake it off and walk away.
But not my man. He’ll never walk away from me. Every morning when he opens his eyes and sees the underside of his cellmate’s bunk, he’ll think of why he’s there. I’ll be his first and last thought, every single day.
Here’s what the therapists always say: what’s the difference between a man who beats his wife and one who kills her? One got angrier. They only say that because they don’t know him. He never did anything out of anger. It was so much more than that. I don’t think anyone will ever understand him the way that I did.
It’s not his fault that he couldn’t change. But what it’s taken me a long time to realise is that it’s also not my fault that I couldn’t change him. That’s the thing about a beast. If you love him enough, he’ll change. Oh, he didn’t change? Then you didn’t love him enough. But no one ever loved the way that we did. He was a fairy tale, abrupt and bloody, teaching me a lesson I never quite learned.
I remember when I knew how much I meant to him. We were watching something on TV, I don’t know what, it doesn’t matter. He wasn’t looking at the TV, though. He was looking at me. He did that a lot. I swear I could feel his eyes on me even when he wasn’t in the room.
I know what you’re thinking , he said. I knew what I was meant to reply, which was sorry . That was the easiest rule to remember: he always knew, and I was always sorry. But I didn’t. I looked back at him, and I said: no, you don’t .
A hard look came over his face then, his eyes flat and empty. For a second, he wasn’t a person. I felt something rise up in me like a wave. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t desire. It was both. I felt my heart start to canter.
He came to me, so slow and so soft. That’s how I know it wasn’t anger.
It lasted a long time and I had passed out by the end of it. His hands were around my throat, slick with blood, and I heard the cantering thud of my heart like hoofbeats and the winged black horse was finally coming for me.
I remembered then about that woman he wanted to unearth in the wood. Such devotion he showed her, such care. Don’t we all want to be that woman? Don’t we all want to be found? I fantasised about the discovery of my body. It would be some other girl’s sixteenth birthday but no one would pay attention to her because everyone’s eyes would be on the TV, talking about my body. I imagined a cop, close to retirement, determined to make his final case a good one. Or a rookie, thick-haired and serious-eyed, trying to make his name. Solving my murder would be the last, or first, good thing he would do. He would avenge me.
But I didn’t die. I woke to blue lights and the judder of a stretcher sliding into an ambulance and at the trial I testified from behind a screen and so the last time I ever saw him was that final moment before I lost consciousness, when he tightened his grip on my throat and looked right into my eyes and he saw me, he truly saw me.
Beauty, the Prison Guard
Before this, I worked in a women’s prison. It’s crazy to me that some people still think that women aren’t inherently violent. That every incarcerated woman is just a naive, blushing nun who got caught up with a bad man.
My own mother left me in a dumpster when I was a day old. I still had my umbilical cord. She took the time to arrange the garbage bags on top of me, to hide me. Lucky for me the guy from the pizza place sneaked a smoke in the alley and heard my muffled crying. Tell me that’s not violent. Tell me she didn’t want me to die.
The same act can be considered violent or not violent depending on the circumstances under which it’s done. Think about war. Think about saints. Violence has no fixed reality. The only reason we don’t think women are violent is due to the concept of what we consider violent. A fistfight is violent, a gang shooting is violent. A woman smothering her newborn, overdosing her sickly mother, drowning her kids because her new lover doesn’t want them – that’s not violent, that’s just sad.
There are a lot of baby-killers in women’s prisons. Sexual abusers too. The ‘other woman’ kills the lover who won’t leave his wife; the wife kills her husband for his money; the nurse kills her patients because she feels like it. But sure, all women are naturally gentle nurturers. Poor little lambs, so easily led astray by a man. She was forced, she was provoked, she’s mentally ill. You can’t blame them, can you? As if half the world’s population never feels rage, greed or spite.
I used to think that women read romance novels for the same reason that men read true crime. Wish fulfilment. It lets them think: that could be me. It’s not, but one day it could be. One day I could fulfil my most secret desires – fucking, killing – and I’ll get through this day by dreaming of that one. But then I started noticing how many women read true crime. My theory still holds.
Women write him love letters, can you believe that? They send him nude photos and their worn underwear. The mail censor tries to take those, obviously, but I do my best to make sure they get to him. I know it’s best to keep these women at a distance, so of course I don’t. I want him distracted. I want him high on himself.
I think the most frightening thing about these women is the opposite of what I found in him. These women are something. They’ve got lives, homes, families, careers. They’re not walking around with obvious voids in their lives. A lot of them are professionals. Highly intelligent. Doctors, lawyers. Psychologists, even. You’d think they’d know better. But sometimes it seems like the more you learn, the dumber you get.
The guys here, some of them never sat in a classroom in their lives. But they are smart. In the ways it matters in here. Crafty, organised, impossible to bullshit. That’s what’s great about him. He thinks he’s better than these guys, so he doesn’t learn from them. If he was smart, he’d learn from the women in prison. When men want to escape, they dig tunnels and climb over barbed wire. Women, they enlist others to help. But he’s relying on the last person who’s actually going to help him: himself.
I know exactly where I’m going to be: in a stage, lit by studio lights, giving TV interviews about him. For certain high-profile cases, I could be an expert witness in court. I’ve been thinking about titles for my first book. Close to a Killer ? The Intimacy of Evil ? I’ll keep working on it.
He thinks he’s pure desire, unrestrained, an animal, and he’s right. But what he doesn’t know is that I’m the lion tamer. And at the end of the day, the lion goes back into its cage, and the tamer goes wherever the fuck they want.
Rosalie, the Fiancée
There’s a TV movie about him. They had to change his name and some details about him so that he wouldn’t sue, because he was never actually convicted of all those murders. The actor playing him is hotter than him, but in a bland way. I masturbate to that movie sometimes. Sit there with my hands down my pants, watching him. I’m not usually so garish, but it does give me a giggle. That’s the story, isn’t it? The boy does things while the girl watches. Masculine dominance, feminine submission. Misogyny can be a gift, if you let it be. Small equals helpless. Powerless equals innocent.
Everything about me is a costume, and I’m clever about it. The demure dresses. The soft makeup. The job as a middle-school teacher. The voluntary work. Who cares if it’s real? I look innocent, and that’s what matters. It’s all about the story.
I like to do what I’m told. The trick is to only be told to do what you secretly wanted all along. They told me to get a man, so I did. They told me to let him drive, so I did. Whoever he’s going to mow down on the way – well, that’s not my fault. I’ll say I was only a passenger. And let’s not pretend I’m the only one. Take a minute to think about the number of movies and books about a young woman getting involved with a man despite the fact (because of the fact) she suspects he killed his previous wife.
I used to have this fantasy. Beauty and the Beast. I’m hardly the first woman to have a Disney sexual awakening, but mine was different. I was so bummed out when the Beast turned into a human prince. Beauty loved him as a Beast, right? So why would she then want someone entirely different?
Fuck the prince. I want the Beast. I want a man of muscle and fur, a man with blood in his teeth. I’d clamber up on his broad back, a huge sword in each hand, and we’d rampage our way through the world. Seems pretty clear to me that’s what Beauty wanted.
He’s not going to be inside forever. He didn’t even kill her, and they didn’t convict on the others. All I need to do is wait it out. I’ve got far enough with my own pretty ways, but now I need him. I want his simplicity, his honesty. I want a fist in a face, a bullet in a brain. I want to do things his way. And if we get caught, I won’t even have to protest innocence. I can sit and weep into my hands and the story will be told for me.
It doesn’t matter who he is, not really. What matters is who I can make him into.
He won’t be a man any more. He’ll be a gun with my finger on the trigger.