I thanked Susan for her time. Told her she could keep the yearbook and excused myself before dessert. I took the 20 minute drive to my home on my friend’s couch with the plan to not do a single thing more and hope everything just blew over and took care of itself. It was basically a smaller version of my overall life plan.
*
A few days passed with nothing. I held some brief relief that the whole thing would be over.
Then the calls from Luke started.
I ignored the first few. Let him leave vague voicemails about how I needed to call him back about something “serious.” This was his usual MO for when we were about to break up. He would start a horrible fight or do something really bad and then try to pull the romantic comedy move of doing something over the top romantic, or would buy me some piece of jewelry and the wounds scabbed over enough to drag our doomed relationship onward. Not this time.
The calls from Luke kept coming and coming and coming and I kept ignoring and ignoring and ignoring, but I knew he was going to do something drastic, I just didn’t know what. An oozing sense of dread seeped into me and stuck me on my friend’s couch for days where I was crashing, unable to move anywhere but between the couch, bathroom and refrigerator.
Luke made that drastic move in the middle of the night during one of my trips to the bathroom. I heard his voice whispering from outside the open window as I washed my hands in the near dark.
“Hey, Kayla.”
I screamed as loud as I ever have in my entire life. I looked out the half-opened window and saw the shadow of Luke standing in the bushes outside my friend’s ground-floor apartment. He looked at me through the cover of a dark hoodie, with his shaggy hair jutting out the front.
“Sorry, I knocked on the door, but no one answered and you won’t answer your phone,” Luke whispered.
“So you fucking go Norman Bates and look at me through the bathroom window? Get out of here!” I screamed back.
“No, you don’t understand. You did something you shouldn’t have done, now these people are after me.”
“No. You did something you shouldn’t have done!”
I slammed the window shut.
