Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 69612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“Good girl,” he smiles, looking incredibly debonair and devilish at the precise same time.
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.”