It looks, when one is standing in the kitchen and surveying that side of the room, as if I’m a hoarder. A well-organized, cardboard-box-addicted hoarder. With the exception of food, I have enough supplies to tide me over for at least nine months. I just need the Apocalypse to come the day after my food delivery.
Popping a barbecue chicken with rice into the microwave, I think about killing myself. It’s a frequent daydream of mine—a rational thought process, and one that seems to solve the threat of me causing harm to others. I have yet to walk too far down that path. I could blame it on fear, say that I am too cowardly to do it or too selfish to take my own life. But it’s not that. For some reason, I can’t. Can’t bring myself to take the only life worth taking. Whenever I go there, consider the act, there is a word spoken as clearly as if God were standing in front of me, saying it Himself. Wait. I don’t know what I am waiting for, but I do. I wait.
The bell dings. I open the microwave door and get out my steaming hot dish. Bon appétit.
I killed once, a long time ago. That was one of the reasons I decided to lock myself up. Someday, someone will figure it out, and they will come for me.
When I killed that first time, I fooled myself into thinking it was a onetime thing. That while I had acted in that moment and taken that life, it wasn’t who I was, but rather just what I had become in that one horrific instance.
The dark obsession with killing came when my family died. It left me alone long enough to grieve, to spend hours curled in bed, sobbing for my own situation: loneliness and despair over the loss of my family taking over any normal thought process. But eventually I had to recover, leave my bed, and reenter the rat race known as life. But soon it came a-calling, searching me out in moments of unguarded weakness. In the shower, I would be struck with a vision of slicing a throat open and letting the blood fill the drain. In class, I’d find myself focusing on my science teacher’s neck, fantasizing about wrapping my small hands around it and squeezing until the life was gone from his body.
When the urge got too great—consuming every spare breath and thought that came into my mind—I tried to satisfy it in other ways. Ways that I hate to think about, ways that fill me with embarrassment and dread. Nothing worked. And when I started making serious plans, started picking out victims and sharpening knives, that was when I knew I had to do something. That was when I decided to lock myself up.
I finished the fall semester at the community college, packed up my dorm, quit my I-spray-crap-perfume-on-you-at-Abercrombie job, and moved into the shithole that I now call home. Settled in, turned on utilities, and locked the door.
I haven’t seen a live person since.
CHAPTER 19
HE DISCOVERED HER on a Wednesday night. Late, at a time when normal society was asleep. He entered and left half a dozen chat rooms, each girl wrong for different reasons. Too fat. Too sexual. Too slutty. Too aggressive. And then he found her, her username familiar, one of the ones heavily promoted on the website, the girl regularly present, her commitment to working impressive in its continuity. These girls typically came and went. Pulled from one world to the next, most likely by a man. But she had stayed. And on that Wednesday night, he decided to give her a chance, despite the $6.99-per-minute price tag, a hefty chunk of change compared with what most of the other girls charged.
But she was different. He saw that the moment her smile lit up his screen. She had the same shine as Annie, a pure goodness beaming from her happy face. She blushed into the camera, reaching up with one hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and he could see the innocence. His hand moved without thinking and he clicked the mouse, starting the timer and the quick, fast drain on his credit card.
In 2009, Southern Methodist University did a study on homicidal ideation, which is the thought or fantasy of killing someone. They found that of people surveyed on American university campuses, 50–91 percent admit to having a homicidal fantasy. What kind of fucked-up statistic is 50–91 percent? Did one campus have only half of their students planning death and mayhem, while another campus was crawling with psychotic coeds? The range makes me think that it was a bullshit study, performed by some doctoral candidate who invented a bunch of data and plopped it down on paper. Regardless of its validity, the alarming statistic makes me feel better. It makes me feel normal, as normal as envisioning a brain splattered open can be. On second thought, maybe I don’t want to be normal—not if that’s what normal is. We’re all fucked if that is the case.
It’s ten forty-five p.m., which means I am still camming, but my mind is starting to wander, thoughts of death intruding on my sexual role-plays. It’s going to be an awkward day when my mouth moves without thought and I scream out, “I’m going to kill you!” to the poor middle-aged schmuck sitting before me in his tightey-whiteys.
Ten forty-six p.m.
I think about logging out early, brushing my teeth, and crawling into bed.
It’s been a long day, full of seven- and eight-minute private sessions—the guys who have fifty bucks to spend and want to make sure to get off during that time. So they jack off until they are close and then take me to a private chat where I do nothing but rip off my clothes, spread my legs, touch myself, and moan for the next five minutes. They don’t want to chat. They don’t want anything special. They just want a standard result from an unorthodox source. But that’s what I get on Wednesdays. Fridays are the big-spender days, when clients just got paid and are ready for some lengthy, one-on-one personalized attention. Fridays pass quickly.
I don’t log out early; my OCD won’t allow for the slightest variation from my schedule. I log back into free chat and wait. Barely a minute of flirting passes, then I am taken private, this time by RalphMA35.
CHAPTER 20
MY CAM SETUP didn’t use to be the elaborate production it is today. When I started I had an IBM laptop and a Logitech webcam—the laptop still stuffed with community college course work, the Logitech bought for $19.99 on eBay. I didn’t know about lighting, or backdrops, or sex toys, or outfits. It was just me, on my bed, a bedside lamp creating a glare if I leaned too far to the right. I had my fingers, two pairs of sexy underwear, and an extension cord that allowed me some extra maneuverability with my laptop.
My image was grainy, the video choppy, my robotic movements occasionally blurry. But I was naked, and I was American, so the clients kept appearing and my earnings kept building. My first paycheck was $5,018 for two weeks of work. I was floored.
I paid three months of rent, a grand total of eighteen hundred bucks, banked $1,000, and invested the rest in my new career. I studied the popular girls, noted the crispness of their cameras, the glow of their skin, and I reached out to them, making friends across nine thousand miles of cyberspace. They shared the wealth of knowledge, and I started purchasing.
The first thing I bought was a new camera. Professionals don’t use webcams. They use high-definition digital camcorders and connect them to their computer via a FireWire cable. I bought the best camera I could afford at the time, a Canon VIXIA HF. The cameras I have now? They make that initial cam look like a kid’s toy.
But at that moment in time, when I plugged that camera in and powered it on, the perfect image that scrolled with smooth action across my screen…it was incredible. I gushed, I drooled, and the webcam community responded with gusto. My free chat began filling up quickly, users taking less time to click the “Take to Private Chat” button. And with my new sex toy in hand—a nude, eight-inch, authentic-looking cock—I started raking in the dough. My next paycheck was over ten grand. I celebrated in the only way I knew how: I kicked my feet in the air, squealed with glee, and experienced a brief moment of depression when I realized I had no one to share the news with. I logged off early that night, turning off the cam and settling into bed, one-click buying everything I had ever wanted.
A Louis Vuitton purse. Bought.
A Betsey Johnson dress. Bought.
MAC makeup, in every sheen and sparkle that
fit my fancy. Bought.
My dark side piped up and I switched websites.
A Dark Ops Stratofighter Stiletto Tactical Knife. Bought.
A Spyderco Embassy aluminum switchblade. Bought.
At two in the morning, I left the fun stuff and started researching computers, finally deciding on and ordering a MacBook Pro laptop, fully loaded and promised to be delivered in the next four to six business days. I finalized my order, then closed the laptop with a satisfied smile and went to bed.
I quickly learned the pointlessness of spending money on purses, shoes, and dresses. Those items are worthless if there is no one around to see them worn. They actually worked against my happiness, their designer lines and beauty mocking me from a shelf in my empty closet, an indicator of the life I wasn’t leading, places I wasn’t going, people I wasn’t seeing.
So I stopped wasting money and focused on the good stuff. A second bed courtesy of IKEA, mattresses delivered within forty-eight hours by 1-800-Mattress. I had discovered that lube and latex make a bed stink, and I wanted one I could dedicate to camming. Lighting: six spotlights that surround my pink bed, each holding two sets of lights, more than six hundred watts per spotlight. Proper lighting makes you glow on camera, makes cellulite and wrinkles disappear. It is also motherfucking hot. I looked at buying a cooling pad for the mattress, then realized it was a hell of a lot easier to just turn down the thermostat. My utility bills are enormous but unsurprising given my sixty-six-degree apartment.
I also have the crème de la crème of sex toys, in every different color, form, and fetish. Glass dildos? Check. A nude RealSkin cock that shoots out fake cum? Um…yeah—in white, black, and extra thick. Kegel balls, anal beads, rabbits, duckies, plugs, clamps, whips, cuffs, suctions, gags, and wands. I now have dressers full of stockings, garters, lingerie, leather, latex, heels, fishnets, and lace. Very rarely does a client request something that I don’t own.
I redecorated the cam bedroom the second year in this apartment. By “the cam bedroom,” I mean the left side of the giant open area that is apartment 6E. The side where I have the IKEA bed that I use for camming. Where my lights and cameras and the stands that everything latches into is. It was purely functional at that point in time, just a bed and the tools of my trade. The second year, I decided more attention needed to be paid to the character I played, the nineteen-year-old college student I pretended to be. I started buying, ordering every pink, girlish, freshman-in-college item I could find, including two gallons of Rose Petal paint. It took a week for everything to arrive, my apartment filling with boxes of every size and shape. Once everything was delivered, I turned off the cameras for three days, moving everything to the center of my apartment. Then I painted, assembled cheap, particleboard furniture, and started hanging items. Calendars, posters, pictures of annoying happy coeds I printed off the Internet. I got some used textbooks off eBay and stacked them on the dresser. Unwrapped and washed pink sheets and a giant comforter. After pushing my bed back in place and surveying the final product, I decided I might have overdone it a bit in the pink department. Even now, after I’ve thrown away some of the girlish crap, it looks as if Pepto-Bismol threw up all over that side of the apartment.
The other half of my loft? I have, for the most part, ignored that side. It is where I sleep, where I read or shop online in an attempt to distract my mind until sleep comes. My decorating motif for that side of the room is cardboard boxes, a mattress on the floor, and books. Superfancy. I call it Crazy Girl Chic.
CHAPTER 21
AGEPLAY: A form of role-playing in which an individual acts or treats another as if they were a different age. Ageplay is between adults and involves consent from all parties. Typically, ageplay involves someone pretending to be younger than they actually are.6 Ageplay can have sexual tones but is not considered to be pedophilia, though it can involve roleplaying of a child-adult relationship (such as a daddy’s girl scenario).7
TEN FORTY-NINE P.M. I smile brightly at the webcam on my pink bed because he hasn’t yet asked me to move. He did ask me to take off my shorts, which I tossed onto the floor.
RalphMA35: do u have something else 2 wear?
I smile. “Sure. What kind of thing do you like?”
RalphMA35: maybe a tshirt. something pink, with ruffles
A pink, ruffled T-shirt isn’t in my closet. Doesn’t sound like anything that even exists. But I know what he wants. He wants a young look. I smile brightly at him and bounce off the bed, move to the white dresser, and pull open the top drawer.
I take out a faded pink T-shirt, one that is thin enough to show my nipples and has a blushing Minnie Mouse on the front of it. I pull it on, exchanging the silk thongs I am wearing for a pair of white cotton panties.
It is not a frequent occurrence, but I occasionally get ageplay clients whose kink borders on pedophilia. It is an issue for me, one that I often lie in bed thinking about. Dr. Brian says that it’s not always that they want a young girl; rather, they are looking for innocence. They want the initial experience—to be a girl’s first. She doesn’t have to be under eighteen, or under fourteen, or nine—she just has to be untouched. He urges me not to judge a client just because he wants me to act innocent: to giggle, and gasp, and tell him that I have never seen a penis.
I agree with him on part of this. Some of the clients, especially the ones who are underendowed, seem to want inexperience—to be “wowed” by everything they say. Some want me to be hesitant, unsure, to give them resistance at first. But differentiating among the motivations is a tricky minefield and one I hate entering.
I crawl up on the bed and sit, cross-legged, smiling at the black camera eye. “Is this okay? I don’t have one with ruffles.” I pull my hair into a low ponytail and chew on my bottom lip.
RalphMA35: looks great bb. can we roleplay?
I lean back, resting my weight on my hands, stretching my T-shirt tight against my chest. “Sure, Ralph. But I don’t have a lot of experience, so please be patient with me.” I tilt my head to the side.
RalphMA35: okay bb. whats ur name
“What do you want it to be?”
RalphMA35: annie
CHAPTER 22
JEREMY
JEREMY BRYANT KNOCKS on the door, holds up the box, and waits for the cursory response. It always takes a minute to come, a minute in which his palms sweat, and he wonders. He wonders if this is the day that the knob will turn and he will be face-to-face with her. Today isn’t that day.
“Leave it. Thank you.”
Always polite. Always brief. Always that beautiful, lilting voice that seems to hold so much distance in it. He signs the electronic pad, waves to the silent peephole, and walks the long hall to the elevator.
Waiting for her to open the door had never worked. He is going to try something different today.
He presses the elevator button, steps inside, presses the 1 button, then quickly steps off and allows the doors to close. He flattens against the walls, hidden from view, and waits, his eyes glued to the box in front of the door to apartment 6E.
The minute the elevator car leaves, making its empty descent, there is the click of a door opening. He tenses. The door opens, a silent movement, then a pale arm and a dark head reach out, grab the package, and pull it inside. There is another click, and the door is closed. He leans back against the wall quietly, thinking.
Brunette. Pale. It is more than he knew yesterday. He hears the elevator’s exhausted ascent, and then it is opening, a black man in workout clothes getting off. He nods to the man, steps into the car, and lets it carry him back downstairs. Waiting for the car to reach the ground floor, he wonders, as he always does, why she hides. Because hiding most certainly seems to be why she keeps inside. Hiding from whom? Or what? Hiding from something, that was for damn sure.
CHAPTER 23
I LEAN AGAINST the front door and eat teriyaki chicken, which came with rice and some steamed-to-death green stuff they called vegetables. I used to have cable
, but three months into the service something broke and the screen would display only an error message. I called the company, which walked me through four different troubleshooting solutions (none of which worked) before they came to the conclusion that I would need a service call. No, thank you. I told them to disconnect the service. Television took time away from camming anyway. As far as Internet goes, Mike logged into my system remotely and set it up so I could steal Internet from my three closest neighbors. I normally use the Internet from “Team Bradley,” which is the apartment to the right of me: it has the fastest connection. But in the rare instances it is offline, disconnected, or running slowly, I use one of the other two wireless networks available, courtesy of my favorite horny hacker.
With no cable, my biggest form of entertainment is eavesdropping on my neighbors. I lean back, listening to dead silence on the other side of the metal door. Surely someone will be in the hall soon. I hope for the bodybuilder down the hall with the bleach-blonde girlfriend. They always have drama-filled conversations. There is a noise and then the slam of a door. I can tell by the sound that the door bounces a bit, not quite shutting, but the footsteps continue, and by the shuffle of them and the speed at which they are by my door, I know that it is Simon. When his feet are flush with my door, I speak. Loudly, so he can hear me.
“Your door’s not shut.”
His footsteps stop, and I can tell from the light underneath my door that he has turned to face me. I also know, without getting up, that he is looking in my peephole, though he knows from every other experience that he can’t see anything inside.