This story takes place a few months before the end of my senior year in high school. I have changed the names for anonymity.
I feel like I was an average kid, pretty-well liked. I had a close group of 5 friends and we were always together, but we had a larger group of friends that constituted our circle, maybe 25 of us. We partied every weekend, took trips out to Eric’s parents beach house, tried to have as much fun as possible before college started.
I was between girlfriends at the time and always wore my favorite cologne, it was fairly expensive but girls always commented on how good it smelled. One day, while watching a football scrimmage in the stadium bleachers, I noticed a girl staring at us from several rows down. I couldn’t be sure but it seemed like she was looking at me. I smiled at her and she looked away.
She was average height with long brown hair, pretty but awkward. I couldn’t remember seeing her anywhere else before, but our school was pretty big so I thought nothing of it. I noticed she kept looking back at me throughout the scrimmage, and I thought it was weird she wasn’t with anybody as this wasn’t really an official school event.
Over the next couple of weeks I would see that same girl pretty often. I started to notice that when I caught her glance she would be closer to me than the last time I had seen her.
One day, I was with my buddy Aaron at our favorite local café having lunch when I noticed that same girl was sitting in a booth 2 rows over from us. She kept looking up at me from behind her menu. I asked Aaron if he knew who she was and he shrugged it off and got up to go to the restroom.
I decided to approach the girl and ask who she was, but when I started to get closer to her I smelled it. The smell was so strong it almost hurt my nose; it was cologne, the same cologne I always wear. It smelled like she had bathed in it. I recoiled from the smell, and she just looked up at me and says, “Hi Justin. Don’t you like the way it smells?”. All I could muster what a muffled “why?”. She hesitated before saying, “it reminds me of you when I’m not close enough to smell you”.
I immediately dropped cash on our table and ran outside, texting Aaron to meet me at the car. How did she know my name? How long has she been following me? The wording really creeped me out, “when I’m not close enough to smell you”. That made me think that she was never too far away.
When Aaron came out I told him what happened. He just laughed and mocked me. He said I was being dramatic, that the girl obviously just knew who I was from school and that she was just a weirdo. Maybe it was a prank or something, but I couldn’t shake a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the look in her eyes, cold but piercing.
The next weekend we were all heading out to Eric’s parents beach house for a night of drinking, playing beer pong and whatever other debauchery we could get in to. The whole trip was spent trying to get the girl out of my mind, while my buddies just made fun of me for it all. Their lighthearted jabs helped, and I was able to loosen up as we set up for the party.
Fast forward a few hours later and we were all having a blast. The nearest residence was pretty far off and we were able to blast music as loud as we wanted through the outside speakers. We had a big table set up on the ground floor for drinking games and a keg sitting on the back porch.
A girl stumbled up from the path leading to the beach, complaining about the smell coming from the patch of bushes that sat on the edge of where the sand started. Nobody paid much attention to her, but about an hour later me and Amanda, a girl I had been talking to, decided to take a walk along the water.
When we reached the bushes at the end of the path, the smell hit us. Amanda screeched with disgust. “What the hell is that?”. I knew what it was though, and it was even stronger than the first time I smelled it. “Go back inside, quick!”, I told Amanda. But before we could leave, the girl with the long brown hair emerged from the bushes holding a large kitchen knife. “Don’t you like the smell Justin? I did it for you”, she said. “Who are you?” I shouted as Amanda ran back to the house. She looked at me with those cold, piercing eyes, and slowly said, “I knew you would be with that whore, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of her”.
My mind was reeling with confusion and my fear suddenly turned to anger. I lunged at her to grab the knife, but she was too quick. She slashed my leg open and then hit me in the head with the butt of the knife. She began trying to drag me into the bushes but luckily by this time Aaron, Luke, and Eric were running over to us. She quickly let go and ran into the night.
By the time the police arrived she was nowhere to be found, but in the bushes where she had been hiding the police found zip ties, duct tape, and a diary filled with pictures of me. It turns out the girl’s name was Lucy and she had been following me for over a year. She had been writing about how we were going to run away and build a house together. She had detailed plans of how she was going to kill Amanda, my ex, and all the other girls I had talked to over the last year. There were at least ten pages that just had my name scrawled across them hundreds of times.
I had lost quite a bit of blood and had to go to the hospital for stitches. Over the next few days I couldn’t stand the thought of Lucy coming to my house to finish what she started so I stayed over at Aaron’s house.
A week after the beach house incident, Amanda’s neighbor had called the police about a suspicious looking girl lurking around Amanda’s house. The police found Lucy trying to crawl through a window, this time all she had on her was a knife and a bottle of cologne. I’m not sure how much jail time she served for all of this, but it definitely wasn’t enough.
I graduated and went to college across the country without any further incident. Four years later I got my bachelors degree and bought a house with my now fiancé. Even after these years I still don’t buy that cologne, I can’t bring myself to relive that incident.
Two days ago, I went to leave for work at 6:30am. I opened my front door to find a wrapped package, no note, no return address, just a kiss mark. I rubbed the mark with my thumb and the lipstick rubbed off; this was fresh. I didn’t see anybody on the street. I took the package in and opened it. There was only one thing inside; a bottle of cologne.