Brooklyn
Thirteen Months Ago
His name in my phone is Creep.
It started as a joke the first night, when a stranger told me to buy a red dress and I called him exactly what he was and saved the number under it out of spite.
Five months later I haven’t changed it, because every time the screen lights up with that word my stomach does a stupid little flip, and a girl should have at least one thing in her life she can’t explain to anybody.
He still won’t show me his face. I’ve asked. I’ve gotten clever about asking. Angled a selfie so the corner of a room shows behind me, fishing.
ME:
Your turn.
I got back a single dry line that made me laugh out loud at my own ceiling
CREEP
Nice try, Brooklyn.
He won’t call, either. I’ve never heard his voice. I tell myself I don’t lie awake wondering what it sounds like.
What he does is text. Every day. First thing, last thing, the middle of the night when my brain won’t shut off and I’m the only person awake in a home full of people who love me and somehow still don’t see me.
He’s always there. He answers in seconds, like he’s been holding the phone, waiting, which should frighten me more than it does.
Tonight there’s a charity thing downstairs.
My dad’s foundation, a hundred people in the ballroom of a family that owns half the city, and I’ve been introduced eleven times as Matteo’s daughter and Sienna’s girl and once, by a senator with wine on his breath, as the little fighter, isn’t she precious, like I’m a party trick my parents brought to perform.
So I’m up here on the stairs in a dress I hate, hiding, doing the thing I always do now when the loud, bright loneliness of my own family gets to be too much.
ME
If one more person tells me how much I look like my mom I’m going to bite them.
All it does is reinforce that I’m not actually hers.
And I hate that fact being shoved down my throat.
Because when I do look in the mirror, even I could see it.
If you didn’t know she didn’t birth me, I could look like her.
A lot like her, and that used to me mine.
Not anyone else’s, just mine, and I loved it. I cherished it.
CREEP
You don’t look like her.
ME
Everyone says I do.
CREEP
Everyone’s lazy. You have her posture because you decided to. You picked her, doll. The whole world thinks she picked you and they have it backwards. That’s the part they can’t see. It’s the most interesting thing about you and they walk right past it.
I read it three times.
That’s the thing nobody understands about him, the thing I couldn’t explain to Harley if I tried, which is why I haven’t.
He doesn’t flatter me. He doesn’t tell me I’m pretty, or tough, or any of the things people say to my face because they’re afraid of my last name.
He just pays attention, harder than anyone ever has, and then he hands me back the parts of myself I thought were invisible like they were obvious all along.
He sees me better than even I see me.
ME
My dad would lose his mind if he knew I was talking to you.
He still checks the lock on a window.
CREEP
Your dad’s right to be afraid of the world. He’s wrong about which part of it is dangerous to you.
ME
And which part is that?
CREEP
Go back downstairs, Brooklyn. Your brother’s looking for you. Antonio. He hates these things more than you do and he’s ten and he doesn’t have anyone to text.
I go still.
Because I never told him my brother’s name.
I sit there on the cold step with my heart doing something complicated, and I think the thought I think at least once a week and never let myself finish: he knows things he shouldn’t.
He sees me when he isn’t even here. This is not normal, Brooklyn, this is not safe, this is the exact thing your whole family has spent your whole life trying to protect you from.
And then I think about the box.
It came on Tuesday. No return address, my name on it in handwriting I’d never seen.
Inside: a tin of the almond cookies from the bakery in Sicily that ships maybe twice a year, the only sweet on earth that doesn’t cramp my stomach.
The exact ones. Not a guess. Not close. The precise, specific, impossible thing that I have never once gotten right from a person who supposedly loves me, because my own family still forgets, at holidays, that I can’t eat what they eat.
A stranger remembered. A stranger I’ve never seen got it perfectly right. A man I labeled a masked ghost instead of a stalker.
There was a note in the tin, four words, no signature.
So you’re never hungry.
I should have shown my father the box. I should have handed the whole thing to Dom and let him run the number and find out who this man is before it goes any further.
Instead I ate one cookie a night to make them last, and I texted a man called Creep back.
ME
Thank you
CREEP
Don’t thank me, just eat.
I lay in my bed in a house full of bodyguards feeling, for the first time, completely safe.
ME:
How do you always know what I need before I do?
There’s a pause. Longer than usual. The three dots come and go twice, like for once he’s choosing his words instead of already having them.
CREEP
Because I pay attention to you. That’s all it is. That’s all it ever was.
Now go find your brother.
I stand up. I smooth the dress I hate. And before I go back down to a room full of people who’ve known me my whole life and never once gotten me right, I send the truest thing I’ve ever said to anyone, and I mean it all the way down to my soul.
ME
You’re the only one who sees me.
I watch the dots appear. I watch them sit there a long, long time.
He never answers.
And I tell myself the silence doesn’t mean anything. That he fell asleep, that he’s not the type for sappy lines, that a man who won’t even show me his face was never going to hand me the rest of himself over a text.
I believe none of it.
I descend the stairs, holding a phone lit up with one unanswered confession, smiling anyway. Because somewhere out there in the dark there’s one person who sees me, and tonight that’s enough.
I already know it won’t be enough for long.