My lawyer has advised me against continuing to post. My sister, Jenny, has asked me to please stop. I apologize to both of them for acting against their wishes.
Everything I am about to tell you is the honest truth. I would testify to it in court. As a matter of fact, I intend to.
After my last update, there was nothing to report. I was staying with Jenny and just eating the cost of the commute for work. Within a couple weeks, I had a new apartment lined up, and Jenny offered to help me move the rest of the furniture to save on money for a moving service. Plus, I don’t think she wanted me to be left alone for too long. Even now in my new place, she calls me almost every day. We’re closer than we’ve been since we were kids, but it’s fucked that it took something like this to…
So the furniture. We borrowed her husband’s pickup and were just taking my stuff down. I didn’t ever have a lot, a table and a desk, a couple chairs, nightstands, my bed, and the couch. Consummate bachelor shit. Not even any wall art. I noticed that as we were taking stuff out. Spending so much time with Jenny’s family, it was suddenly weird to me that I had left my walls totally bare for as long as I’d lived here and it never bothered me. Which made me think about Eloise’s art, and I had this crazy urge to own one of her paintings, like a consolation prize for all she’d put me through.
We were carrying the couch through the kitchen, and ended up knocking it into a wall while I was distracted.
I heard a thump. Jenny and I set the couch down so we could check our pockets, thinking someone had dropped a phone. Neither of us saw anything until we’d gotten the couch out into the hallway.
There was something flat and square on the ground, blue and a little bigger than a credit card. I thought it was some bit of junk mail or a gift card or something that had fallen off the fridge or out from beneath the couch cushions, but when I picked it up, it was slim, cool plastic, and on the down-facing side, there was a little speaker. The upwards facing side was sticky, and sure enough when we tipped the couch over there was a strip of duct tape dangling.
We found the second one under my bed, taped to my mattress. By this point I was hysterical, tearing up the apartment for anything else unseemly. I hadn’t told Jenny all the details of my life for the last several months and she assumed this sudden move, the hospitalization, my erratic behavior, were symptoms of a mental health crisis. Now she was seeing in sudden, confusing detail that the mental health crisis was a symptom of this.
How had I missed it this whole time? I don’t know how I could have been so stupid, because when Eloise’s voice came out of the speaker, it was obvious. Tinny, an inadequate recording playing out of an ill equipped speaker. It was one of those optical illusions where once you see the intended shape you can’t make your eyes unfocus enough to find the old one.
I wanted it to be her. Even if it meant she hated me. It wasn’t that I was fooled. I wanted to be fooled.
We did a thorough sweep of my apartment and found cameras. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, one aimed at my front door. An entire spying operation dedicated to me. I crushed them, snapped the speaker things. Jenny was sitting really quietly on my kitchen floor, just watching and trying to process all of it.
She asked me what was going on. I mean, she’d been asking me, but I wasn’t ready to speak until I had gotten rid of as much of the stuff as possible. I thought the best way to explain it was to show her the Reddit stuff, and she almost thought I was fucking with her.
Yeah, I shouldn’t have busted up all the evidence. I never said it was a good idea, but it was an absolutely necessary one. Could you live with something like that in your house, still recording, for even a minute longer than it took to eliminate them? I don’t want evil things in my life. And in front of my fucking sister no less, who is innocent in all of this regardless of what I’ve done or what this fucking sicko that had invented Eloise thinks of me.
Because it was clear now. Eloise was a fiction. A pretext to stalk and terrify me, to remind me of one of the worst things that has ever happened to me and use it as a weapon to hurt me. I’m not going to apologize or feel callous for making this about myself anymore, because Eloise is dead and she’s not listening, and I’m still here living with the consequences. I brushed it off like it was no big deal? Well, it was. I lied. I’m telling the truth now. The day Eloise killed herself was the second worst day of my life.
This was the first.
I told Jenny to stay there and I ran to Nicole’s. I pounded on her door for a good couple minutes, and I felt bad waking her because at that time she’d normally be asleep for her night job. This couldn’t wait. I was already running it through my head, what I would have to tell her about the Reddit thread and my stalker to catch her up to speed. She lived in Eloise’s old place for god’s sake, so how could this person pass up involving her?
She eventually opened the door a couple inches. She peered through it, heavy bags under her doe eyes. “What’s…?”
“Nicole, I need to talk to you. Please, this is seriously urgent.”
“Oh. Um, about Eloise?”
I pushed my way inside, scared someone would overhear us. For all I knew, her apartment had been tapped. We would have to de-bug the whole thing, do a clean search, with profuse apologies from me for roping her into this. I don’t think she was expecting me to be so forceful, but she scrambled out of the way.
“Yeah,” I said. “About Eloise.”
I’d never been inside her place before, but it was really dark. Obviously, I mean, she was semi-nocturnal, she’d probably barely had a chance to put the lights on. But it unnerved me. The only light came from her multi monitored computer setup in the bedroom, visible through the doorway; and the outdoors through her drawn curtains.
“I don’t know what to think. I was just with my sister. It’s too much.”
She wandered or maybe ran to the balcony, and I followed her. I couldn’t make out the look on her face in the dark. I don’t think she was even really listening to me.
Shutting the door, I glanced around again for some spy or assailant. I was utterly tunnel visioned. Nicole had pressed herself into a corner, her back to the balcony railing.
“I just found all these cameras and shit. It all makes sense now. Her Facebook page, her accounts, the shadow, everything, I mean someone must have–” It was a hot summer afternoon, but between one breath and the next the air turned sharp and freezing in my chest. “Someone must have…”
Nicole the psychic moved into my dead neighbor’s haunted apartment. Except there never was a haunting. Which means she was never a psychic. God, I was so stupid.
“Nicole…?”
She blinked at me. “Neighbor?”
I reeled. From the very moment I started talking about Eloise, she’d been there with me. Neighbor, neighbor, neighbor, not in Eloise’s wholesome next-door voice but the anonymous chatter of the mob. I could finally put a face to it all. My voice thickened, burdened with choked back tears.
I asked her, “How could you do this to me? Why did you do this?”
And do you know what she did?
She shrugged. Like a little kid when you ask why they didn’t do their homework. Perfect innocence. Obvious guilt.
I thought I was going to throw up, my heart was beating so fast. “Don’t fucking shrug, Nicole, you poisoned me!”
“Oh come on, like you actually have a meat allergy? A little pork blood wasn’t actually going to hurt you. You just had a panic attack.”
“I went to the hospital.”
“Yeah, because you panicked and shot adrenaline into your leg.”
Oh my god, I realized then. I’m talking to someone who tried to kill me, and this is her only response. Nicole looked just as honest with me now as ever. Big open eyes, and nothing more off to her voice than a condescending tone. It was surreal. I think she really believed it.
I tried asking again: why did this happen? She wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I was in her space, with half a foot over her, and she didn’t so much as flinch. Her hand went to her pocket. Did she have a knife, or a taser? The steady drip of adrenaline left me shaking. If I had to, I knew I could stop her, but there’s a difference between telling yourself something and putting your body into motion.
“What do you want?” I begged. “What were you trying to accomplish? What did you think this would do?”
She rolled her eyes. “I thought that was pretty obvious.”
Yes, right. Killing myself. “But why?”
“Because you deserve it.”
The internet is not real life. The internet is a brick wall. You press your ear to it to hear voices on the other side. Maybe you whisper along. Across the courtyard, I saw Jenny in my apartment, frantically on the phone with someone, but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. I’m no good at reading lips. She looked up and saw me crying. She ran out.
Nicole kept talking.
“You know, it’s not really hard to pick a lock. It’s not hard to print off bills. She had a bunch still in the trash when she died. Even the expensive stuff, getting ahold of the cameras and setting up the hotspot to keep them streaming, that can all go on credit cards. You can open a new line of credit basically anywhere, anytime. You don’t even have to use your real name. Lots of people do it; you’ve got stuff in your name, I bet, you wouldn’t even believe.
“But you know what the hard part was, really?” She kind of laughed. “Catching all those fucking pigeons.”
If I ran out of there, back through that dark apartment, would she follow me? Nicole was feverish, pink, and ready to take matters into her own hands. If I’d pushed her to this point where she was confronting me face to face, what could I make her do? I was thinking all of that, but I still said, “You are a fucking sociopath.”
Her nostrils flared. “Oh, I’m the sociopath? When you watched her die and did nothing, and then pretended… It’s offensive, honestly, to think you could have stopped her.”
“I never said that,” I insisted. You guys know I’ve never pretended to be some hero, right? I’ve never acted like I could have changed things, and wishing I had isn’t the same thing.
“You don’t have to say it. I know you believe it.”
I didn’t, I don’t, but there was no reasoning with her. “She was just nice. Why can’t I just care about someone who was nice to me? I mean, as though I don’t understand how it feels to be lonely.”
Nicole crowded up into my space, and I had to put my hands out to block her. The first time I ever touched her. I thought she was going to jump up and maul me. Her teeth were out in such an ugly snarl it barely looked human.
“See, this is why. You’re so arrogant, you’re obviously not the only one who’s seen her stuff. Because I have. I found it before you, and I showed it to you. All you can ever have is a voyeuristic, secondhand Eloise, but I’ve been her. I’ve been in her skin in ways you could never understand.”
I was at a loss for words. I was deep in the swamp of panic and it was sucking me down fast. I didn’t know how to interrupt her. Even if I did, what could I say to defend myself that hadn’t already been said?
Nicole kept going, more vicious the longer I failed to respond. “You’re a fucking monster. You think you’re in love with her? You think she would have gone for some manipulative, soft little creep? You couldn’t even save yourself, but you have the gall to think you could have saved Eloise? The best thing for either of you now is to kill yourself.”
I shook my head. I tried backing off, up against the glass of the balcony. From behind, loud enough we could both hear, someone was pounding on her door. And she got this wild look on her face, electric. The way I imagine racers look when they’re about to take a curve too fast to pull out of.
“It’s too bad she isn’t really here to see you now. She’d be proud of me for avenging her.”
That’s when Nicole jumped.
She snapped her neck in the courtyard. When I got up the guts to look down, she had landed in the same flowerbed that Eloise’s falling body had crushed in May.
I can’t tell you what must have been going through her mind, and speculation is not admissible in court, as my attorney keeps reminding me. But this is not a courtroom.
This was how she decided to punish me. Nicole- and that wasn’t her real name, of course- was fucked up. Like Eloise, she was underwater on credit, falling behind on rent. She decided her best course of action was to take that out on someone like me, who had done something she thought was wrong. She dedicated months of time, moved across the state, stole identities and committed god knows how much fraud, just to ruin my life. She ruined her own life out of pure spite. That’s not the work of a rational mind.
So when it looked like I might get away unscathed after all that effort, she thought, like I have thought: can he live with a second dead girl on his conscience?
I can. And I will.
Some of this may not seem to add up, but sometimes the truth is inconvenient.
My court date is a few months from now. I’ve moved to a different part of town. I have heard no voices and seen no shadows. God willing, a jury of my peers will determine my innocence.
Nicole jumped.
Goodbye, Eloise. I wish we could have been friends.
- Neighbor