Page 11 of The Banker

“Because there’s a pattern most stalkers follow. They start out nice, pledging their undying love. When you don’t respond in the way they want, they get intense. ‘But we’re meant to be together. I’m your soulmate; it’s fate.’ She says this with a whiny voice and a curled lip and it’s almost comical. “Then, you know, it’s time to cut all communication with them, which obviously, they hate. Then, it’s all ‘you’re talentless, you’re nothing without me, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life’, blah blah blah. And then they move onto the name-calling, and then come the threats.”

I watch her talk, conscious my eyes are wide. What this girl has seen and become accustomed to, by the mere age of nineteen, is mind-blowing.

“Depending on the stalker, the threats can be relatively harmless. You know, ‘I’m going to write to the local paper and tell them all your secrets’, etcetera. But others graduate to the death threats pretty quickly, and that’s when we have to get the cops involved.”

“You only get the cops involved at that point?” I’m stunned.

She cocks her head to one side, her expression one of mild amusement. “It’s the only way they’ll take me seriously. If I called the cops every time someone called me a whore, they’d get tired of me pretty quickly. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. I don’t need the cops to roll their eyes at me when the real wolf shows up.”

I can feel the hair on the back of my neck bristle, and can’t help but admire her maturity. She lives with this every day, I think. And Joe Public out there has absolutely no idea.

“How do they make the threats? Do you have evidence?”

“Oh, various ways. Some are old school,” she says, reaching into a duffel bag by her feet. “Some are handwritten—different pen types and styles, of course—while others are made from letters that have been cut out of magazines and glued on. I kinda like those,” she says, shaking her head. “They make me feel like Whitney Houston inBodyguard. Like, someone cares so much, they’ve gone to all the trouble of cutting out individual letters and words and sticking them all together to make a message.” She slaps a pile of notes on the table and looks out of the window, wistfully. “All I need now is my very own Kevin Costner.”

“Doesn’t he part ways with Whitney Houston at the end?” I ask, taking the notes and flicking through them, carefully.

“I don’t remember,” she sighs. “Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s a fairy tale. Happy endings don’t happen in real life, do they?” She drinks the rest of her water while, for some reason, I commit those words to my memory. They resonate, and I don’t know why.

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