Chapter 8
Laura
Being stalked is a weird thing in that knowing who your stalker is doesn’t actually stop the stalking.
I sit in my apartment. Nothing looks the same as it did before. Dr. Samuel Rollins is on television, marketing his book: Melting at Room Temperature: a modern guide to emotional regulation.
I think the title is wordy and corny, and a little too meta for most people to get, but he knows that.
Creatures like him know how to calibrate themselves to be just the right level of not quite relatable.
Makes people want to gain his approval because they get the sense he’s just that little bit smarter than them.
Not so smart they hate him reflexively, just the right level of comforting intellect.
It’s all part of his carefully curated exterior. And the best part, from his perspective, is that having a carefully curated exterior is part of the job. So people know he’s fake and accept it because he’s supposed to be.
Right now, I’m not being stalked by him, because this is a live morning TV interview and he’s on the East Coast.
“Are you single, Dr. Rollins?” The interviewer is looking at him with gleaming doe eyes.
I feel a pulse of jealousy.
“What the fuck, Laura?” I curse the question at myself. I’m not supposed to care what he does. I should be happy if someone else catches his eye.
Can your stalker and captor cheat on you, technically? There’s no indication he would, but I’m figuring the relationship itself doesn’t exactly imply monogamy.
“I’m not, actually,” he says.
“Lucky lady,” she replies.
I shouldn’t feel so excited about his response. He didn’t say I was his partner. He can’t, of course. Would really fuck his whole stalking plan up.
My phone rings. It’s my mom.
I pick up. I have a full day of classes, so I hope she doesn’t have anything too serious for me to…
“Laura! I need you to get Jake from school. He’s been suspended for fighting.”
“How? It’s not even nine in the morning!”
“He got into a fight at eight-thirty,” she says. “Please, pick him up and do something with him today. I’ve got work all day.”
“I have classes, Mom. He will have to come with me, I guess?”
“Whatever you do with him, just… do something,” she says. “I have to go.”
My brother is not in a good state. He’s pissed. His jacket is torn. He looks so furious.
“They jumped me and I got in trouble. Again,” he says. “It’s not fair. They get to go to class and I have to go home just because they have money and we don’t have any.”
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I say. I’m about to tell him to get into the bus and take him to class with me, but we’re already pushing the schedule to get to class anyway and I don’t like this. I’m tired of seeing him be pushed around.
I look at the school, and I look back at my brother, and I decide to do something.
“Come with me,” I tell him. “They’re not going to get away with this.”
“What are you doing?”
“Going to speak with the principal,” I say. I walk into the school with my brother in tow. I’m not sure how he feels about this, but he’s not telling me not to go in there.
“I’d like to see the principal, please,” I say at the front desk.
The receptionist looks at me as if I am one of the students at the school. I don’t look that young, but I have a feeling she looks at everyone that way.
“Principal Borland is busy.”
“Jake, go to class,” I tell him.
“But…”
“Go to class,” I repeat.
He gets up and he goes.
Then I find the principal’s office, which is not hard because it’s presumably the door behind the desk with the word Principal written on it.
“You can’t go back there!” the secretary says. But I can go back there, and I do.
I open the door without knocking, because I’m already breaking social norms and I figure one more won’t hurt.
The principal looks up from his laptop in shock and slams it closed far too quickly for a man who is doing appropriate activities. I see his face twist up as he prepares to yell at me, and then he realizes he’s looking at a college coed, and his expression softens.
This man is in his fifties, soft around the middle and probably inside the skull. He’s wearing a yellowed shirt that I don’t think started out that way.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m Jake Brown’s sister,” I tell him. “And I had to skip class this morning to come and pick him up. But when I got here, he told me that he’d been assaulted. Again.”
“Well…”
“I just told my brother to go to class,” I say, interrupting whatever incredibly mediocre thought was about to emerge from him. “Because the notion that someone being bullied would be excluded from class is so wild as to be impossible.”
“Jake has had behavioral issues at every school he has attended. He’s clearly the problem.”
I see red. This isn’t fair. He knows it’s not fair.
But he’s using Jake’s history against him, because he clearly has no intention whatsoever of helping my little brother.
Jake’s going to be victimized again and again because men like this have decided he’s the problem, and they will never see anything else.
I pick up the water on the principal’s desk and throw it in his face.
“You’re wet,” I say. “So you’re clearly the ocean.”
“Get out of my office, and my school,” he says, completely ignoring my very well illustrated point. “And take your brother with you.”
“You’re going to regret this,” I say.
He is too busy brushing water off his shirt, which of course doesn’t work. A complete lack of understanding of anything probably indicates the level of education they have at this school anyway.
“Are you threatening me?”
“This time I threw the water. Next time, it might be the glass.”
I don’t really know what’s coming over me right now.
Maybe I’m just fucking tired of being unable to do anything.
My whole life I have done everything correctly.
I’ve been polite. I’ve studied hard. I’ve tried to be good in relationships.
And it’s gotten me to a point where all I have to show for it is a shitty job and a stalker I can’t do anything about.
“This is no way to convince me your brother isn’t violent.
He’s clearly from a violent home. We took him in as a favor, and he immediately started causing trouble, the same way you are.
” The principal stands up. He’s a big man, actually, quite beefy and probably strong in the way men always are for absolutely no reason.
“I guess this is why you don’t deal with bullies in your school,” I say. “Because you are one.”
“You are the one who burst into my office, demanded I change my mind on a serious disciplinary issue, assaulted me, and threatened to commit more assault. If anything, young lady, you are the bully.”
Oh, I hate arguments like that. He’s technically right, but he’s morally fucking wrong and he knows it. I wish I had another glass of water to throw at him. I am so tired of seeing the defeated, sad look on my brother’s face, like nobody is going to defend him and he knows it.
Mom is going to be so pissed at him for being kicked out of school again. She’s going to be pissed at me, too. Fuck. What can I do?
“You should take a good hard look at yourself,” the principal says, giving me that fucking tone that only school teachers give kids because they think they’re better than them on some fundamental level.
It’s riling me up. The last few days and weeks have been a lot of me taking something and not being able to do fucking anything about it.
But this asshole isn’t nearly as scary as my stalker, and I refuse to bow down to him.
“But maybe there is something you can do,” he says, closing the distance by a step.
“Maybe…” He lowers his voice and speaks in a disgustingly husky whisper.
“You bend your ass over that desk and let me teach that tight little pussy a lesson and I’ll let your piece of shit brother attend class for another term. Think of it as paying rent.”
And that’s when I… well, I want to say slap him in the face, but my hands had reflexively already fisted when he told me to take a look at myself, and instead of swinging at him, I jab at him.
The result is me punching him directly in the nose. A spray of blood is instant, as is his howl of anguish.
“Call the police, Denise!” he shouts. “This little bitch just assaulted me!”
I run out of his office before he can grab me and do god knows what under the guise of self-defense.
To my joy, Jake didn’t go to class. He’s standing in the foyer looking confused as I burst out of the principal’s office with the man himself in tow, bleeding heavily down his wet, semi-see-through shirt.
“Jake! We’re leaving! Now!”
I grab my little brother and run.
“What did you do?” He’s laughing as we take the steps down from the school two and three at a time.
“I hit him,” I say, panting. “It was wrong and you really shouldn’t hit people but sometimes…”
As luck would have it, a bus is pulling up on the corner just as we reach it. Sometimes, god really does show you that he’s on your side. We jump on, tap our cards, and the bus is away before anybody can follow us.
“Did you break his nose?” Jake is excited.
“I don’t know, buddy. Probably. Maybe.”
He grins at me. “Definitely,” he says. “I’m so proud.”
“Don’t be. We’re both going to be in trouble. I’m going to take you home, okay? And then I’m going to…”
“What?”
My mind is spinning. They’ve definitely called the police, and I am definitely going to be in trouble. But I have to look after Jake first. I’ll worry about what might or might not happen to me later. But if the police are looking for us…
“Let’s go to the water park,” I say.
“What?”
“Yeah.”
I have money. A lot of it. My stalker didn’t confiscate the funds. I can take Jake home at the end of the day and we can both face the music then, but for the rest of today, we’re going to have fun.