She crossed through the arch of the popular lingerie store and marveled at the decor. It looked like a circus, all polka-dots and bright pastels on the walls and a similar theme piled in the bra and undie carousel bins. She was expecting all blacks, silvers, and frills; but, besides the larger-than-life wall decals of the famous models everyone knew from the television ads, this looked more like Chuck E. Cheese’s or any of those places that decked everything out in bright colors to make you move on faster, fast food psychology, she’d read that somewhere.
She picked up the first item available on a sale rack that had a sign claiming “Very Sexy Lace-Trim Cheeky Panties.” Wow. She usually bought underwear at Macy’s or Kohl’s almost as an afterthought. She turned the garment over in her hands. They were her size all right, with black and white tiger stripes and red edging. All she needed now was a Catwoman eye mask and a black studded whip and she’d have the perfect costume for answering the door on Halloween, bringing the dads up to the porch from the sidewalk for a better look-see and sending the kids running the other way screaming. Aesthetic as well as functional! She brought her forearm up to her mouth to choke back a run of the giggles, and her stomach was starting to hurt quivering with it, and she turned to go and pay for her precious booty, and oh God, not that pun, not now, and then she stopped laughing.
There by a bra display was a young woman squatting down like a baseball catcher to get to the sale items that were stored under the bottommost tier. Her gray stretch pants were pulled to a low arc, and her shirt had risen up exposing more than the curve of her waist and bare back. She had no underwear showing because like Marissa she wasn’t wearing any, and you could see the tip of her crack just above the band of her pants, a full-on view of the skin darkening inside the sweet indentation, and you didn’t have to be a lesbian to understand that the display was far sexier than the polka-dots and wall decals. Girlfriend had long black hair that caught the overhead lights in shimmers and boasted that manicured inward curl down at the bottom edge.
Marissa took a quick glance all around and was alarmed to see that there were three men looking at this girl, one with a backpack and a Yankees cap standing by the ankle sock rack, a forty-something in dress clothes staring at her sideways and pretending to read a tag with small print, and a curly-haired, unshaven dude who’d just stomped up right beside her. He was wearing a faded leather jacket with a turned-up collar, loose jeans, and black hiking boots, making no attempt at subtlety, studying her up close, staring hard at her skin, the contours, the tender ridges, her pores and dimples, her goosebumps and freckles, making a masturbation video in his head that he would probably be so caught up with that he’d have to take care of it the minute he got his car back on 476 where no one could see what he was doing from the waist down.
Marissa walked in to the right so she could pay and make an exit. Guys looked, she knew that. She usually thrived on it, thought it was cute and harmless. But why were these men in a women’s underwear store to begin with? Were there no safe zones where a girl could get a freaking break? Oh, right. The girl’s room, where they put up wet floor signs and peeked under the stall doors.
That settled it. No tanning booths ever again, no dressing rooms, no gym locker rooms or swim clubs or water parks. Trust no one. Guys were pigs.
She approached the register, and a young black woman with a hard, pretty face and blond tints in her hair fingered the underwear all brusque and professional and turned the tag up toward the light. Someone tall behind Marissa in line was casting a shadow across them both, and for a second she thought the cashier was going to tell her that she wasn’t a good fit for this particular brand of cheeky panties, maybe try to sell her up to a different style or tell her that there was a minimum purchase rule for a Discover card.
The clerk was just looking for the barcode.
Behind Marissa, the shadow moved slightly and she got a sudden chill. The person behind her wasn’t just tall; gigantic was a better word for it, and he was standing close to her now, too close, a total invasion of personal space almost like someone going nose to nose with you in the elevator when everyone knew you were supposed to look up at the floor numbers changing.
The store had to have cameras! He’d played his hand too early! She spun around and made to I.D. him, claim harassment, have him questioned. Then she could hint that he had been stalking her, giving the mall cops every reason to go directly to the local police or the staties, and then straight to the Special Victims Unit detectives for this jurisdiction, right up the pipeline. They’d get a warrant and find his basement torture chamber, or attic shrine with pictures he took on his cell phone of his victims, or the back yard vegetable garden masking the area behind it where the dirt had been so recently turned and mounded into a series of shallow graves.
It was a woman wearing jeans with holes in the knees, cowboy boots, and a motorcycle jacket. She was six feet at least and seemed even taller because she had her long curly hair put up in one of those cornhusks you did with a rubber band when you were in a hurry. She had long slanting cheeks and clever eyes. She was chewing gum and was holding a toddler on her hip, he who had his finger hooked in his mouth and one of the straps of his OshKosh overalls unsnapped and dangling.
“You’ve got a big piece of lint in your hair, sweetie,” she said. “Spin around, I’ll get it.”
Marissa did so robotically, felt her hair move, turned back. The woman was holding it between her thumb and forefinger as if for proof.
“Thanks,” Marissa said.
The woman flicked it away and laughed. Sounded hoarse and neighborly.
“I do it all the time, honey. Just ain’t shy about the little things, that’s all. Lucky you didn’t have a piece of broccoli in your teeth or I’d have had my fingers in your mouth.”
“Your card?” the cashier said.
“Oh,” Marissa said. She pivoted on her heel and got it out, trying to complete this exchange and get out as quickly as possible. This wasn’t her serial killer, and she didn’t have to have patchwork to know this. She was drained suddenly, exhausted, and she just wanted to go home.
Back in the hall, she went to tunnel vision, moving straight ahead, no scrutiny, no looking at the people passing her and possibly looking back. A to B. One foot in front of the other. When she got out through the Court door she walked straight through the crosswalk without even looking both ways, just depending on her peripheral vision, and it took everything she had to avoid Bloomingdale’s looming behind her left shoulder and the fact that she loved browsing through that place, checking out the new electronics, the latest styles in handbags and footwear, the sparkling jewelry counter where the assistants had an air about them as if they were ready to serve royalty.
Back to the parking area.
The low concrete overhang had a stop sign on the facing. She hadn’t noticed that before. Another prophetic indicator and she ignored it, walked under it, and moved toward section 2H, ready to take off her heels and drive the hell out of this place.
There was a car in the space next to hers, facing away with the engine running. It was an economy car, and she couldn’t tell the make or model because it had electrical tape pressed over the insignia. There was a dent knocked into the left corner of the bumper, water spots on the back windshield, and fluid dripping out of the tailpipe. Exhaust threaded up toward the ceiling, and she could see a dark form hunched at the wheel.
The tires screeched away, making her jump. The peeling rubber kicked up putrid white smoke, and the back end of the vehicle skidded back and forth fighting for a straight line in its rapid burst off through the otherwise barren section of the lot. It left ugly blackened tracks on the concrete, and Marissa instinctively screamed into the echo and stink with a good ole all-American,
“Fucking asshole!”
In response, he screeched his tires again, braking, swerving his car into a half-turn and a rapid halt. It settled next to one of the support pylons about two hundred feet away, facing Marissa th
ree-quarters front. He hit on his brights, and now Marissa’s all-American retort was the standard,
“What the fuck . . .”
He revved his engine like a race car driver showing off the horses he had straining against their bridles under the hood, and it made Marissa think of Jerome and whether or not he would miss her too much. She couldn’t believe it was going down this way, for real, right here and right now, and she tried her best to do what she had to do with a rational adult’s control.
She fumbled out her keys and hit the “unlock” button on the pad. Her tail lights flashed as she knew the headlights had up front, and as she approached her vehicle the guy on the other side of the lot jerked forward, then halted, forward again, then dead stop, taunting. Next he trumpeted a one-two-three-four on the gas, kicking up a belches of exhaust so thick the clouds actually crept up over the roof and feathered down past the headlights.
Marissa opened her door, but it was heavy and she had her keys in her hand, the other occupied with her bag and her purchase. With three fingers she pulled, thinking that she could have put the keys up on the black canvas ragtop or at least clamped them in her mouth, but when you were rushing you were stuck with what you did the moment before, and while she did manage to get it all open the handle snapped out of her grip at the last moment and she dropped her keys on the pavement.
She threw in her stuff, turned, and sat sidesaddle, reaching down to her feet to remove those high heels. The left one had a funky strap that always stuck, and she had to baby it. There was a screeching across the lot, fury on the pavement, and she took a second to look over the opened door and let out a whimper. He was coming, headlights bearing down, back end swaying with it, a hundred feet or so and closing.
Marissa got her shoes off and threw them over her shoulder into the car. Her keys were still on the pavement just out of reach, and she wasted a second trying to hold her position with her fanny on the side of the seat, stretching.
“Christ!” she said, pushing off, grabbing the small bundle, peeking one more time above the edge of the door. The approaching vehicle was almost upon her, and she hauled herself in. She barely had the wingspan to reach back out for the door, but with a painful stretch and dangerous lean she grabbed the void in the hard molded plastic and yanked it all shut.
The car screamed past her, inches from the closed door. Marissa brought up her hands and shook them by her face, screaming back to no one. In her sideview mirror, she saw him swerve and almost hit the side wall of the ramp. There was a stop, another screech of tires, more fishtailing, and he came back around her, across her bow then flat alongside her, driver’s door to driver’s door, inches away.
Marissa hadn’t even put her key in the ignition. She’d been too shocked, too slow. His window was tinted, and she figured she had nowhere to run now because he’d blocked her ability to open her door. She was trapped, and while a small voice inside her was saying in a smooth and slow voice, “Just turn on the car and drive forward,” it seemed she was sunk down in tar, unable to move, breathe, blink: she just stared at the dark window to her immediate left.
It started to lower. Then all coy and gross he moved down along with it, making it so for a long moment he was just a pair of laughing eyes over the edge.
Finally the Plexiglas disappeared into the rubber rim and he was smiling at her, all chin-zits and crooked teeth, and she knew him, Harvey Glick, this weird guy she’d met in her classes at Widener who must have coincidentally been here at the right place and the right time and spotted her car. He almost always wore this maroon American Eagle hoodie and dirty silk gym shorts regardless of the season, and was the type that came from the suburbs and felt entitled, the type that had his hair mapped sideways across his forehead and made a living ranking on people, total douchebag. She breathed a sigh of relief, but it was tinged a bright angry red. He had been partnered with her back in the first week of classes when they had to do a thinkpair-share concerning the film Crash and what it said to them as freshman about racism and cultural sensitivity. Since the paper had to be co-authored over a weekend she had had to forfeit her cell number, and he’d texted her back right there in room 118, saying, “Send me a picture of your tits.” Now this was a loser!
Of course, she had long since read his patchwork that day and was therefore currently enlightened to the fact that he was no serial killer, wrong virgin, ha. She knew that he lived in the dorms above the ROTC building in Hanna Hall, that he drove his roommate insane by leaving soda cans all over the place and farting in his sleep all night, that he came from Freehold, New Jersey, and that he’d been in love with Caroline Jordan back in eighth grade when he was nicer. Eventually the girl had told him to pound sand, sending them off in different directions in terms of their life journeys.
He stopped laughing for a second, made a V with his index and middle fingers, and did that rapid flickering of his tongue in between. Marissa lowered her window.
“You are disgusting,” she said.
“Made ya wet, huh?”
“Ted Wiess is the one who ruined you.”
His face withered. Now it was Marissa turning the engine over and screeching her tires, though hers made a short, ladylike burst that was easy to control back out toward the ramp. She knew from past patchwork that as a young boy, Harvey had been into robotics and comics, the polite, quiet, and self-absorbed kid who lived in the corner house on Juniper and Vine. He’d met Caroline Jordan in science class and they hooked up, kissed, held hands, told each other everything. Then this kid Ted Wiess moved in next door, with his skateboards and his weed, and Harvey was over there constantly, making mischief, getting high.
Ted convinced him to call Caroline and play her, making it seem that he didn’t care all that much. Her response had been, “Ted Wiess ruined you.”
Of course, Caroline Jordan bloomed into a vibrant young woman, student council, yearbook, tennis team, and she was in the running for homecoming queen her senior year. Harvey wound up at Widener trying to sneak by with a liberal arts major they didn’t really specialize in, and from the looks of things he wasn’t aiming to commit to any kind of study that would allow him to stay very long.
Marissa drove up the ramp and back toward 476, stewing. It wasn’t like her to use the patchwork against someone, even if he was an absolute tool. Cruising down the highway she looked in her rearview a number of times, but the scrutiny followed no logical cycle. Behind her were cars, lots of cars, and she had no idea whether one or the other had been in tow for more than a normal duration.
She wasn’t good at this. In fact, she was horrible.
Enough. She was alive and well in the here and now, and she was going to stay that way.
When she got off at the Broomall exit she didn’t make a left toward her house on New Ardmore Avenue. She made a right and cut back up Lawrence Road. He wanted to tail her? Fine.
She was going straight to the police station.
RUBBER
MAN
Yeah, asshole. I’m guessing her little trip to the cops didn’t help her much considering the endgame we’re all so familiar with by now. Of course, I have no fucking idea where I was back at the point she pulled into the police parking area because she’s making me relive it her way, but I can sure tell you what my “20” was just now at the mall considering it’s “in the past” and all. I was the “pebble” ticking along the concrete by the stairwells. See, after first spotting her on Dekalb Pike I turned around double-quick and followed from a safe distance, parking two lots over when she went down to the lower level. That red Mustang stuck out like a junkyard rat on a wedding cake, and it wasn’t difficult to find it after I made my way down one stairwell and walked the far edge of the lot to hide behind another. And it wasn’t a pebble. It was a Pez candy. I love those fucking things, and they don’t taste the same if you don’t suck them out of the plastic dispenser. Problem is, I like to bite the whole thing, work it with my teeth like a cigar, and I’d damaged the orifice. I like that word.
Orifice. So one of them fell out while I was gnawing at it, and I saw her look over. It spooked her and it was perfect. I’ve always been lucky with the timing all through the process, and this was no exception.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking, asshole. Why is a clicking piece of Pez on the cement so special when I probably eat them all the time, dropping them out through the damaged orifices, making the girls look? Thing is, I don’t eat Pez all the time. Like I told you before, the only ritual I have is munching on my El Sabroso Hot and Spicy Pork Rinds after the cutting and detail phase out on location right before the digging portion, so fuck you and your mother trying to peg me and my hunting style.
See, each girl is different, with her own special mannerisms and trepidations. You like that word? Not as good as “orifice,” I admit, but I ain’t particular when it comes to finding the terms I need to express myself. And I don’t stalk each girl the same, because she has to be a part of the process. She has to suspect something but still expose that personal secret path for me to follow her down like a shadow. Every path is different, and when I jump it’s as new for them as it is for me.
I got Becky Lockhart by the abandoned Copenhagen shack right down the street from her house. She went there to catch a smoke in secret every night at around 11:00 once her grandma fell asleep in front of the television with the Afghan blanket draped over her knees and her knitting in her lap. I hid under the rusted blade hood of an abandoned king-sized rotary rake for hay, down where she must have figured only the snakes and the rats kept company with each other. Sarah-Jean Kennedy took pre-dawn jogs, and really burned it up a steep dirt road that forked off Virginia Avenue and led to the park. Three-quarters up the hill they were doing tree surgery to make way for the power lines, and I waited for her in the funnel chute of their biggest Asplundh tree shredder. Veronica Kimbel was a secret purger with a lot of close friends and family, so she was extra careful to blow her cookies only in the Sunoco gas station, the one that was going out of business on the way home from the office on Maple Street, that ramshackle joint with the trash bags fluttering on the pump handles and the bathroom unlocked and isolated at the rear of the building. I hid in the dumpster behind the corroded water tank, walked in quiet as a churchmouse, and had a big surprise for her there in stall number two.
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