“Is that so?”
“It is so. They’ve lost me. And I think they’re going to keep losing me.” I draw in a deep breath too, but I let it out in a dramatic sigh because unlike my nemesis, I am not trying to hold my emotional state back. I am more free than she is. I am also having more fun.
“You could turn yourself into me,” she says.
“Oh, I don’t think I’d turn myself into you,” I muse, deliberately misinterpreting her words. “I think I’d like to know what being a penguin feels like first.”
If she were a man, she’d growl, I think. As it is, she draws in her breath in a very annoyed hiss. “You know what I mean.”
“What will you give me if I come in?” I ask the question with a smile on my face.
“I will let you live.”
“Wow. Threatening to kill me. Not very chill of you.”
“I…”
I don’t know what she was going to say, because I end the call. This woman clearly has absolutely no limits when it comes to what she will do in order to get what she wants. If she were a man, I’d call her ruthless. I call her ruthless now too.
I guess I am finding somewhere to stay tonight. I do need to get a few things from my apartment first. Simple stuff. Socks and underwear kind of stuff.
I know it’s a risk, but at a certain point, risks have to be taken. I want a bag of things.
I wait until late at night, like 2:00 in the morning. It’s been a day and a half since I was home and I am missing the basic security of my own environment. I do my due diligence first, of course. I keep an eye out to see if there are any weird cars nearby. I don’t see any. No vans for businesses that don’t exist in our area, no slowly circling cruising cars that keep showing up.
I open the Internet and type ‘how to tell if your house is being watched.’ Nothing comes up that I didn’t think of already. So I sneak in. It feels so strange to be at home, and yet feel like I’m not entirely safe there.
The door is locked like I left it, but when I open it, I see my place has been tossed about.
I don’t turn the main light on. I don’t want there to be a beacon that tells these people I am here and they can come and get me. So I use the light on my phone, and that relatively narrow beam reveals a series of intrusions and breakages that make me gasp.
Those. Assholes.
I’ve been annoyed through this, I guess, sort of excited and nervous and a bit scared. This is the first time I’ve been seriously pissed. They came into my home and threw my things around, breaking little pieces of art I collected over the years from friends and family. My underwear drawer has been emptied out, tossed in the bath and drenched, along with all the clothes in my wardrobe. Fuck. They’ve made it so I can’t come back for a fresh set of anything. All my electronics are either broken or gone.
I am homeless, I realize. I might still be paying for this apartment, but they’ve rendered everything in it unusable. I have the clothes on my back, and my phone, which is starting to run low on battery, and of course my charger is either in the mass of stuff they’ve left piled everywhere, or gone completely.
Tears sting my eyes. I don’t want to cry, but I know I am fucked. I can’t go to any of my friends; even if I knew people who would take me in, they’d be in danger if they had anything to do with me.
I scramble around in the dark, trying to find anything useful.
I find nothing besides a bunch of broken glass and other hazards also left to make sure that coming here is upsetting and dangerous.
Finally, I cut my finger.
“Ouch!” I stick it in my mouth and suck the blood and with this final incursion into my being, the tears start to flow. How dare they do this to me. How fucking dare they.
“Stop crying,” I lecture myself as I cry more. “You can do this. They’re just bullies, and you’ve dealt with bullies before.”
The last time I had bullies in my life was when I was seven years old, but I assume the general procedure for dealing with them is about the same now as it was then.
I keep picking through things a little more. They took what they knew to take, but I’m the sort of person who puts things away for safekeeping and then forgets where they are. That gives me an advantage at times like these.
I find my old charger, one that was stuffed at the back of my junk drawer. It’ll work on this phone, though not as fast. I don’t really trust anything in the kitchen thanks to the way they rifled through it, but I have some noodles and candy in a shoebox under the bed, which they didn’t touch.
They really weren’t thorough, I realize as I sit on the floor of my trashed apartment, tearing open a bag of sour candy and tipping the brightly colored nuggets into the palm of my hand before shooting them into my mouth.
They wanted to fuck my place up and intimidate me, but my real secrets are still secret. There’s probably a moral to that story.