Today, I’m low on toilet paper, which is literally the only thing in the world that would make me leave my house. It’s not until I’m in the checkout lane with my four-pack of Charmin clutched to my chest that it occurs to me that people aren’t staring because Beck Ryder tweeted me last night to shut up and go make some babies, but not with me, of course, but because there’s no legitimate reason for me to be acting like a celebrity in hiding since no one here knows I’m @must_love_bees on Twitter, and honestly, @must_love_bees isn’t a celebrity by any measure anyway.
Damn underwear model.
He’s screwing with my head. And my life.
My regular cashier gives me a once-over. “You goin’ to a party?” she asks, her gaze drifting between my sunglasses, hat, and the toilet paper on the belt.
“Social experiment,” I reply. “Are you more or less likely to talk to people when they come into the store in sunglasses?”
“More,” she says the same time the guy at the other register says, “Less. Gotta respect the privacy.”
“People only dress like that when they want attention,” the grandma behind me informs us all. She taps the cover of one of the tabloids. “Like this guy claiming to be Genghis Khan reincarnated with a penis shaped like a dragon. He wears sunglasses everywhere.”
So long as no one asks to see my peen-dragon, I think I’ll be okay.
I escape all of them and hustle my toilet paper back to my car, which I now feel foolish for driving, because the temperature is in the high seventies, the sunshine is broken up by drifting fluffy white clouds, and it’s only a ten-minute walk from my house to the store.
When I reach my neighborhood three minutes later, none of my neighbors are snooping in my windows.
Not even Ellie Ryder next door, who’s undoubtedly related to the underwear ape, though we’ve never talked about family, because reasons, but who’s also out of town this week.
Or so she said when her boyfriend showed up with his kid last weekend. Something about a pirate festival in the mountains. I didn’t ask any more.
I don’t get close to people.
Most people, I should specify. There are exceptions. But not my neighbors.
My cat, Andromeda—Meda for short—is sleeping in the front window of my little Craftsman bungalow. And there aren’t any unusual cars parked on the street under the oaks and hemlocks.
It’s not that I’m paranoid.
It’s—okay. Fine.
I’m paranoid.
You would be too if you had my parents and my childhood.
I should probably call them.
I pull into the garage and hit the button to drop the door behind me before I get out of the car with my toilet paper. I drop my haul in the bathroom and bypass my little computer hidey-hole because ugh.
It will be weeks before my social media feeds quit blowing up over that stupid underwear model and his asinine suggestion that I’m nothing more than an ugly baby factory.
Might as well reinvent myself.
Again.
Especially if the neighbor is related to him. And if she remembers my Twitter handle.
She’s an environmental engineer.
I’m an environmental engineer.
She likes animals.
I like animals.
It made sense to tell her about my science and conservation website.
Whatever.
There are probably thousands of Ryders in Copper Valley.
“You know what pisses me off the most, Meda?” I say to my cat.
She meows back from her perch in the windowsill, giving me a piece of her mind while I nod along. She’s half-Siamese, half tabby—I think—and all sass and attitude to make up for not fitting squarely into a box, and we get along very well.
“Exactly. I finally had a following of people who love science and geeking out over planetary discoveries and new recycling technologies, and there he goes, turning my entire existence into a circus about my uterus instead of about saving the planet.”
I don’t have to log on to my social media accounts—or my website stats—to know what it looks like. It’s the same as every digital public lynching.
Everyone assumes they know the whole story. They post their opinions about it on the internet, then start with the name-calling—on both sides—and post things they’d never say to your face, and eventually someone will find my address and I’ll have to go into hiding.
Again.
Dammit dammit dammit.
Not that I didn’t enjoy my gap year, but I like my life now.
I throw my sunglasses onto the upcycled coffee table in my eclectic living room and follow it with my hat, which lands squarely inside the massive box of Avengers bobbleheads that Mom sent last week and that I haven’t yet dragged to the basement.
No time like today, because when I have to leave, those can stay behind. Not because I don’t appreciate them—I think the Golden Thor is in that box, and hello, golden hottie, but please don’t tell anyone I said that—but because I anticipate needing to make a fast escape with just the essentials.
I like my house.
And it’s a big damn pain to change your name on the down-low. Maybe I should skip that step and move to Fiji this time.
“I know, I know, I’m being melodramatic,” I say to Meda, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not. It’s hard to tell when you know you don’t always have a firm grasp on normal. “But I promise I won’t leave you behind.”
She meows at me again, staring at me with one blue eye and one amber eye, hops off her cat bed perch in the front window, and sashays into the kitchen, where she’s undoubtedly expecting dinner.
Four hours early.
I trail behind her, because she was five pounds of fur and bone when I brought her home from the shelter, and she can eat anytime she wants.
But as soon as I step into the kitchen, the hairs on the back of my arms stand up.
Someone’s in my backyard.
Inside my privacy fence.
Next to my wooden beehives.
He’s slinking toward the house in sunglasses, a ball cap pulled low, and a sweatshirt.
In June.
And if he thinks he’s going to get anything out of me, he can think again.
I slip my taser out of my grandma’s cookie jar and drop to my hands and knees to crawl over the plain beige linoleum to the back door, then lift my head just high enough to peer through the pane glass window above the doorknob.
He’s coming this way.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Meda meows again.
The stranger’s head swings my way—the creep is making sure he’s not being watched—and I duck down.
But only until there’s a knock on the door.
And then it’s all action.
I leap up, twist the doorknob, and I yell, “Think again, asshole!”
My heart’s pounding so hard it’s shaking my nipples. My voice is thick and high because holy fuck I’m staring down an intruder, and I don’t think, I just point and squeeze.
I can’t see his eyes, but I see his lips part under the dark scruff around his mouth and over his jawline. His body jerks once, twice, and then he’s down.
Sack of potatoes down.
“Oh my god, Beck, I’m going to kill you,” a woman shrieks as she dashes through my back gate.
I point the taser at her. “Back!” I yell a split second before recognition kicks in.