Back in 2002 you had a weekend ritual of meeting up at Delia’s house and then driving into downtown Hartford to hit up the bars: Tangerine, Loose Lucy’s, The Stop. It was always jam-packed and the bartenders knew you and your friends’ names. They lined up rows of free shots, your slender hand—with those long fake nails and gold bracelets dangling from your wrist—plucked the shot off the sticky bar. You flung your head back along with that luxurious dark brown hair, to down the shot, lots of guys looking on, swarming around you. You look like that actress, they’d always say. You got a boyfriend? I’m Jimmy. Paul. Thom. Sean. Jack. Dean. Fred. Vic. Mario. There were so many guys, too many to keep track of, too many all over the place and everywhere, which made it harder to figure out. They always said you resembled Catherine Zeta-Jones, or that supermodel—that hottie from those Guns ‘N Roses videos in the early nineties. “November Rain.” “Don’t Cry.” Yeah, that’s it, they’d say. Stephanie Seymour.
It was because of your long hair like a black velvet curtain down your slender back and your intense eyes with stars in them, already buzzed and glossy from Delia’s house—the to-go coffee cup filled to the brim with fruit juice and cheap vodka (or rum, or tequila, or gin, or whiskey, it didn’t matter) to sip while perfecting the final touches of your hair and makeup in Delia’s upstairs bathroom, 112 and Usher blasting on the radio. But these guys were like animals, ravenous for what was between your legs, thinking they were entitled to brush up against you, pancake themselves against your back, touching your arm, your waist as they moved past you, excuse me, they’d say, fingers pressing hard into your hip bone right before letting go. But you were also aware of how you looked and you knew what they wanted and you knew you could withhold it and there was power in that. You liked to come home around three, four in the morning, wobbly and hungry, raiding the fridge for something creamy, crispy, greasy—like crab rangoon or onion rings or your mom’s leftover lasagna. And water, always lots of cold water.
But then, one time, the phone rang: Hello? hello? you said, but no one was there.
You didn’t think much of it. Probably some guy you exchanged numbers with at the bar. You slammed the cordless phone down and resumed searching for The Snack much needed after shots of vodka and a series of strong Long Island iced teas. I’m in danger never crossed your mind. Not yet. But the calls soon became a pattern.
The first couple of weekends thereafter, the calls came at two, three o’clock in the morning, hang ups one right after another about a half hour after arriving home from the bars. Never at any other time. Never during the day. Never during the week. You didn’t think much of it at first. There were more important tasks, like finding The Snack in the kitchen after the bars. You hunched over a plate of salty, soggy diner fries at the table with the kitchen light like a spotlight encircled by the dark house, the dark yard, the dark woods where anyone could be watching. Strangely, you were fine with it, used to the onlookers and gawkers, used to being put on display, very early on, around eighth grade when your breasts had popped out and you’d started bleeding. What else was there to do but go out for cheerleading and prance around in those tiny pleated skirts with white sneakers? And then take it a step further and send snapshots to modeling contests in L.A. and New York City. Your friends—the popular crowd—had understood that drawing bad attention was better than no attention. At the time, you believed being invisible was the worst thing that could happen to you. In high school, you’d started fake IDing your way into dance clubs along the turnpike. Sketchy clubs usually next door to strip clubs and cheap motels. The strip club guys gawked at you as you’d strutted across the cracked pavement to the dance club entrance: flimsy tank top, open back, black miniskirt, and silver platforms like disco balls on your feet, bouncing to DJ Kool: “Let Me Clear My Throat.”
After the weekends, usually Hartford, sometimes Manhattan to stay in Delia’s dad’s city apartment, and hitting up bars in Midtown, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, SoHo, hungover the next day browsing street fairs, buying knockoff Louis Vuitton bags, Burberry scarves, and NY Mafia T-shirts to sleep in, you commenced with a semi-dull routine. You were a senior at UConn, majoring in English, not sure what to do after graduation—but you didn’t care because there was so much time. It was your era of intense crushes, short bursts of heat, all falling apart left and right. There were so many guys. Dream guys. Frat guys. All-American hot, milky white teeth and clear skin, all muscles and hard cocks, hitting up the bars you were at, already half-plastered from house parties. And the classes. Oh, the classes. Art history and English lit and statistics and music. Swarming into dark lecture halls where professors droned on about Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the Renaissance period, or played Mozart’s piano sonatas, or analyzed Book 1 of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Heavy, indulgent premises where you’d catch yourself dazed and sleepy, staring out classroom windows at the snowfall across old stone buildings, dead ivy snaking up the sides, the shadows elongating across brown lawns in winter. You liked to choose a middle row of the lecture halls, feeling indifferent, waiting for the weekend, for Delia’s, but knowing the guys behind you in the back rows were eyeing you. The club guys. The bar guys. The frat guys. You liked to fling your dark hair to one side, lifting one foot up onto the chair in front of you so they could get a peek of a long lean leg in dark rinse jeans, Adidas Superstar sneakers. You could feel their masculine presence behind you while sauntering down the cold, spherical hallways that led to professors’ offices, all leather chairs and stacks of Shakespearean sonnets. And then, every now and then, you caught a pair of eyes behind a row of books while studying in dimly lit libraries where you swore somewhere existed locked doors to secret societies and candlelit vigils. You especially hated statistics. What did an English major need to know about variables and probability? You planned on marrying wealthy anyway. Maybe this: how probable is it you’ll be killed by a man over the course of your beautiful lifetime? By an ex. By a current boyfriend. By a fanatic. By a stranger. You had yet to learn about the aftereffects of domestic violence and dangerous relationships and the statistics of female homicide victims by intimate partners (which would become a part of your dissertation ten years later).
Over one weekend in March, the calls started to escalate. You were holed up at Loose Lucy’s, caught up with a guy named Dan, then Don, then Derek. You and Delia joked about all the Ds all the way to Denny’s for omelets. By 3:30 a.m., you just wanted your bed and so Delia dropped you off by 3:45 a.m. and within ten minutes you collapsed into a blissful, liquor-induced, blackout sleep only to be jolted awake by the phone. Two hang ups: 4:08, 4:09. And then something happened: at 4:12: he spoke. From then on, he started saying crude things about your cunt, your tits, your ass, and what he wanted to do to them. He called you slut, bar whore, dirty bitch. You figured it was a jealous ex. At first, his comments stunned you and you went silent, but then you spoke up and told him to Fuck off, limp dick. You constantly thought about who it was and you couldn’t believe your parents never mentioned the night caller. Heavy sleepers. You had a habit of going through a list of names in your head while sitting in English lit. Who, out of these hundreds of guys encountered every week, every weekend, could it be? Your grades started slipping and your parents started questioning your plans after graduation. Grad school? The weekends started losing their fun—you knew what was waiting for you when you got home. In between shots and exchanging phone numbers with hot guys, you kept wondering:could it be him? him? him? is he here right now at the bar is he watching me is he here at school is he in my class is he here at the gym is he a neighbor is he my friend? The night caller hovered around your entire life like a shadow.
The last time you went out with Delia (for a while anyway) was a Saturday in April when everything was turning soft and warm and muddy, and you came home around two in the morning when the phone rang and you got that zap! up your spine. There he was. That red flush swept across your face, and you finally asked him: Who are you? And he said, Your ending. You threw the cordless phone across the kitchen in terror and locked yourself in the bathroom to bawl over the sink. Snot and tears and drips of black mascara wetting the front of your club shirt. You scrubbed your face clean from the pound of makeup until your skin was pink and raw. The following weekends were silent but it was like you were always waiting for something to happen. You calmed down, graduated UConn, and believed he was gone. And he was. He never called you again and you never found out who it was. You moved into life and through life, three degrees and two ex-husbands later, reflecting back on those wild days when someone was always after you, even today, suspecting every guy that enters your life: was it you? you? you? and still catching yourself glancing behind you in aisle three of a busy grocery store on a bright day—just to make sure.
Jenn Powers is a writer and artist from New England. She resides in New York and is currently working on a mystery thriller. She has work published or forthcoming in over 70 literary journals, including Spillway, CutBank, Witness, Gemini, Lunch Ticket and Prime Number. Her work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Binghamton University. Please visit www.jennpowers.com for more information.