Hi Reddit. I am in desperate need of advice. Call me Alice.
My girlfriend “Lily” (24F) and I (23F) moved into our first house five months ago. It’s only 1156 sq ft and kinda shitty, but we love it. We call it our little cottage. We have two levels, a garage, a porch swing, a teeny front yard full of planter boxes, and plenty of space for me, Lily, and our cat Bugs. Pet tax. And it’s practically brand-new(!!), too.
We’re renting in a…well, I guess you’d call it a pocket neighborhood, because we only have nine other neighbors, and the houses all face each other. It’d almost feel like a panopticon, if the courtyard were a watch tower. Our neighbors are generally decent people, from what we can tell, but they’ve been here longer than we have, so they’re pretty close-knit. Sort of insular. Not exactly the friendly type—to us, anyway.
I only bring up the neighbors because I don’t trust them.
When we first moved in, our cottage was a dream. Just a total dream. Our landlord gives very few shits what we do, and our lease is a full two years, so we painted all the walls in pretty pastel shades of pink and orange, as a nod to the lesbian flag. It felt like living in a sunset. Every weekend we’d go furniture-hunting through thrift shops and yard sales and Craigslist ads. Neither I nor Lily is a hammer-wielding butch wunderkind, but we even built our own kitchen table, and it only wobbles a little. Like I said: a dream.
The bullshit didn’t start until August, two months after we’d moved in. It was nothing huge at first. Like, the fall weather started early and Lily is always cold, so she started cranking up the heat, but one morning we woke up and found the thermostat set to 66°F. No idea why. She accused me of turning it down to pinch pennies (I’m kind of cheap), but I was like, I swear to god, I never touched the thing. The next morning it’d dropped to 65°F. For a week it kept dropping like that, one degree at a time, until the night it jumped from 60° to 50°. Fifty fucking degrees. It was warmer than that outside.
So of course we called the landlord, and of course he said he’d come in and fix it next week, which turned into next month, which turned into never, no matter how often we nagged him. The temp fluctuations grew more random. Sometimes the thermostat would stay at Lily’s 78°F; sometimes it’d only drop a few degrees; sometimes it’d plunge down to 50–55°. Most of the time it’d stay around 65°.
What’s weird is that the temperature only changed at night. Or at least, we only ever noticed it after waking up in the morning. It got to be a ritual for us: we’d go downstairs, bleary-eyed and shivering, and while one of us started the coffee, the other would check the thermostat and yell “Goddammit!” at a volume proportional to the number of degrees it’d dropped.
For the record? The temperature problem is only getting worse as the weather changes. We suspect the house was never properly sealed; the windows are drafty and go foggy in the mornings, and the front door whistles when it’s windy. Plus there’s a doggy door downstairs, and we have no plastic panel to cover it because it’s a really odd size. Like, bigger than any commercial doggy doors I’ve seen. I say commercial doggy doors because ours looks DIYed, so we figure the previous occupant had a fucking bodybuilder of a dog and had to make do.
Anyway, the landlord won’t take care of that either. We just wedged some cardboard in the exterior side of the doggy door. Welcome to my life.
Since Lily ends up freezing most nights, I bought her a heated mattress pad. After one night on top of that thing, with all her blankets piled on top, I was like, I’m gonna die of heatstroke, so I’m currently sleeping on a cot in our bedroom. Yeah, that’s right. A cot. With an old moving box as a nightstand. Not a great set-up for an insomniac like me. I’ve started popping Nyquil caps or Benadryl tablets every night just to get to sleep. Not healthy, I know.
Lily doesn’t know about the Nyquil/Benadryl thing, btw. I mean, she uses Reddit, so she’ll probably find out if this gains any traction (hi, honey!), but I haven’t told her yet because I don’t want her to think that I’ve gone loopy on otc meds. That I’m the one behind all this shit.
See, it’s not just the thermostat.
We lost Lily’s baby album. Her mom made it by hand. It has all of Lily’s pictures from the first two years of her life. We keep it in our bookcase, right on the left end of the top shelf. It’s a big white book frilled with pink lace—you can’t miss it. One night, around mid/late September, Lily went to grab a cookbook while we were making dinner, and she froze. Just stopped in her tracks, completely stone-still. She asked what had happened to her baby album. She asked if maybe I’d moved it somewhere and had forgotten where I put it. I said that I had no idea what happened to it, and I didn’t. I don’t.
But I keep finding those baby pictures. It’s really weird; Lily doesn’t find them. Only I do. They turn up in strange places: behind Bugs’ cat food, between the pages of other books, under the coffee maker, inside the toes of my shoes. And always, always, the photos are headless. It’s never done with scissors, though. Lily’s head is always ripped off. The tears are violent white slashes, jagged and uneven, like they were done in a hurry. Like whoever did it cared about nothing so much as beheading Lily as fast as they could.
Last week, when I was walking into work, I put my hands in my pockets and felt a crumpled wad of something glossy. When I smoothed it out, I recognized it as a photo I’d seen before: little Lily sat in front of her second birthday cake, her lips pursed to blow out the candles. But it had been torn so violently, half her body was just…missing. There was nothing left but a chubby toddler hand, a fragment of dark hair, a snatch of pink fabric that had been a T-shirt. The shirt, I remembered, had said “Doggone cute!” in a speech bubble floating over a cartoon poodle. Now it just said “gone.”
Lily, if you read this: I’m sorry I haven’t told you. And I’m even more sorry that I’ve been throwing away your baby pictures.
But they’re ruined anyway.
Maybe if it were just the thermostat, or just the baby pictures…I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t be so worried. Maybe if I weren’t the only one who kept stumbling across my decapitated partner, if Lily also…Well. Whatever. The thing is, Reddit, the baby pictures aren’t even the worst part.
On Halloween, Lily and I went to a spooky cocktail night at the neighborhood center. (No one invited us, but I saw it mentioned on Nextdoor.) We were just trying to get to know some people, maybe make some friends, y’know? The neighbors were polite, I guess, but we couldn’t get much more than a civil smile out of anyone, and then I got horrible food poisoning, so we walked home pretty early. Maybe 7ish. As soon as we got home, we collapsed in Lily’s bed and conked out, like, instantaneously—even me. I usually sleep like shit when I’m drunk, but I’d been pretty woozy and out of it at the party. I slept like a rock all night, then spent the next day puking.
Whenever we drink, Lily will take a single taste of my drink and be content with her imminent hangoverlessness, so she felt fine. We called in sick to work and she took care of me all day. That night, after I started feeling better, she asked me out of the blue, “Alice, how drunk were you last night?” I was like, wtf are you talking about, I only had a few drinks, I probably got food poisoning from the tuna sandwich I brought to work.
That’s when she showed me the picture.
It was in her camera roll, right beside all her pics from the party, but this was something different. The photo was so dark, I could hardly make out the details. Then I realized…it was Lily. Lily, lying in bed on her stomach like she always does. Lily, all by herself. I’d slept beside her all night. But in the picture, it was just Lily. Alone.
I kept checking the time stamp over and over. November 1st, 2022, 2:33 AM. Halloween night. The night I slept so deeply, I woke up sore all over from keeping the same position for twelve hours straight. But Lily insisted I had to have taken it. I mean, it had to have been me. Right? Right?
That’s what I told her, anyway. Sure it was me. Of course it was me. I must have been drunker than I realized.
I know it wasn’t me, though. And in your heart, Lily, you know that too. Before you deleted the photo, I kept catching you staring at it. You must have spent hours poring over it. Lily, there is no conceivable way you missed that it had been taken from ceiling height, directly over your body. A bird’s eye view of your naked, sleeping figure. I’m 5’2”—even if I’d stood on the bed with my legs straddling your torso, I couldn’t have taken that picture. Not from that height. Not from that angle.
And sweetheart, that’s not all. If you’re reading this, you know I’ve been taking Nyquil and Benadryl to sleep. My medicine keeps going missing, Lily. I keep it in that one box we never finished unpacking, the one full of old cables and electronics. If you haul that box out of the broom closet, inside you’ll find a half-full bottle of Benadryl and an empty 48-count box of Nyquil caps. But I only bought them six weeks ago, baby. I can’t have gone through them that fast. My medicine is disappearing, and it’s no mystery where.
I know how food-aggressive Bugs gets, and I know you think it’s sweet that I wanted to commandeer food duty after he bit you. But that’s not why I want to be the one who feeds him.
I’ve started finding pills in his dry food. Hot pink Benadryl tabs. Little teal gelcaps full of Nyquil.
No matter how many times I swap his food bags for new ones behind your back, those pink and green pills keep appearing in his bowl. I have to lock him in the bathroom so he doesn’t scarf them down before I can pick them out. Once I combed through an entire bag of cat kibble piece by piece—I felt insane, Lily—but even though I was positive, I was certain there were no pills in there, somehow, the next morning, there it was. That technicolor confetti dotting his food.
I’m not poisoning our cat, or fucking with the thermostat, or tearing up your baby pictures, or photographing you naked in the dead of night. But someone is. Someone is.
And I can feel the concern bleeding off of you like tides of radiation, but I am not crazy. You pull me away from the window when I stare out of it; you don’t understand that I’m only staring because they stare first. The neighbors. Didn’t you think it was weird how, after we moved in, not a single one of them stopped by to introduce themselves or give us a housewarming gift? Why didn’t they talk to us at the cocktail party, Lily? Why don’t we know any of their names?
They peer in our windows. I can see them. Hell, for all I know, one of them is reading this even as I write it. I don’t know how, but they could. They’d figure out a way. Look what I found under our doormat, my love: a Bible page, torn as violently as all your baby pictures. They’ve highlighted Proverbs 16:18 (“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”) and written “DECEMBER 1” at the top of the page. Pride, like gay pride, and you know December 1st is World AIDS Day.
So maybe they’re homophobic. Or maybe they want us to think that they are so they can hide their true motive. Does it even matter anymore? They’re tormenting us. It started with the thermostat and it’s only getting worse from there.
Maybe they want us dead, Lily.
I know you don’t like how much work I’ve been missing lately, but I have to stay home and keep Bugs safe. Don’t you get it? We’re not safe here. So stop telling me to see a doctor, and stop giving me those looks like I’m a grenade, fragile and dangerous at once. I’m sick of not-sleeping in a cot across the room, sick of the cold, sick of you and everything you’ve blamed me for. You saw that fucking photograph. You know what’s happening to us.
But you still think I’m crazy. She thinks I’m crazy, Reddit. What am I going to do? What’s going to happen on December 1st? I am not crazy. I’m not.
I’m not crazy.
I’m not crazy.
I’m not crazy.
I AM NOT CRAZY.