1
IT'S NOT LIKE I WANTED TO BE A STALKER. No one says to herself, Oh, he's cute. Let me follow him around, call him every day, and walk by his house after school so many times that within two weeks he'll avoid me in the halls and whisper to his friends that I'm a freak and that I might be cute, but it doesn't matter because I'm a wacko, certifiable, a nut job—one of those girls who takes things too far, makes a fool of herself, and just doesn't seem to care.
Well, I did care. That was the problem. I cared too much and too fast and I lacked the usual humiliation and embarrassment barometers that most girls are awarded at birth or, if they are late bloomers, no later than the end of third grade. It wasn't that I didn't have them. I did, but they always kicked in way too late—after the damage was done and the boy had been scared away. Only then, when I saw him in the hallway averting his eyes, did I realize that I'd gone too far. Then I got embarrassed. I really did, and then I got mad. Mad at myself for doing it again and for being such a colossally crappy reader of what my best friend, Rosie, called the signs.
One of the signs that things were a little out of control was that I'd started to get a reputation. A girl can get a reputation for all kinds of things: for giving hand jobs and blow jobs, for having sex, for not having sex, for posting too many revealing pictures on her Facebook page, for studying too hard, for not studying hard enough, for wearing the wrong bra, or for not wearing a thong with a certain pair of pants. But a reputation for stalking was a different species altogether. To be called a stalker in the hallway, to have it hissed at you by co–head cheerleader Kristy Day, or to have it whispered about you behind your barely turned back as you ran through your scales in band in the hopes of at least looking like you'd practiced, well, then you knew you had a reputation and it was getting out of hand.
I didn't want to be a stalker. It was an accident—a strange natural compulsion that I wanted to believe I could fix. Stalkers were scary guys who in movies showed up outside your window at night. Stalkers required restraining orders and police visits. Stalkers were hardly ever female. Or if they were, they were adult women who had been horribly wronged by their married-to-another-woman boyfriends and who had finally decided to get revenge. You know, there were movies about these women. I mean, they went too far, really too far. Stalkers were not supposed to be teenage girls. I was not supposed to be a stalker. But I was, or at least that's what people in my high school thought.
But I wanted to change and I wanted to get better. It was April of my sophomore year, and I wanted to be a different kind of girl. Maybe it was something about spring. Maybe I wanted to make a fresh start because the flowers were in bloom and the air smelled new and clean. Or maybe I'd had enough. Deep down I knew I wasn't totally crazy, and in a lot of ways I was a normal fifteen-year-old girl who loved English and history and tolerated math because she knew it was important, who had exactly one best friend, who worried that her mother worked too hard, who had a little brother who was a soccer star and an all-around pain in the ass, who had two cats named Lucy and Ethel, who wished she had more clothes, who memorized her favorite scenes from television shows, who was allergic to bee stings, and who had a hard time saying sorry even when she was wrong.
I am Cammie Bliss.
I used to be a stalker.
Copyright © 2012 by Carley Moore
