{if you were} will pewitt

{if you were}
will pewitt

I became infatuated with Lacie Bauer as soon as I found out she had genital herpes. It wasn’t commiseration and it wasn’t any sort of sympathy; my feeling for her was more than simply pity. Infatuation seems an apt word. Also, the attraction wasn’t sexual. Don’t get me wrong, I understand what the disease is; I would like to think I’m fairly aware of the strange level of allure I felt toward Lacie. After I found out, I of course researched genital herpes to no end to know the general effects, the risks of infection, the tendencies of outbreaks. I needed to know the details of one’s danger to oneself.

Lacie’s plight was not the cause of poor luck or of being lied to. Lacie’s issue was simply the result of incorrigible sensical slippage. She was dumb: she had dated Rob O’Connor—a boy whose STD had been quite publicly outed when other members of the football team noticed something in the locker room. Gossip spread. We had sympathy for him. To find out that Lacie Bauer had contracted the disease from him after knowing of his condition did not draw compassion; it only drew shaking heads and rolling eyes. After all, what sympathy can you have for someone who does something that ignorant?

I did not have sympathy. I was obsessed.

* * *

The first time I looked into Lacie’s room, the tree branches in her backyard were slippery. She only shut the blinds on the right side of her bay window which looks out over a small but well-gardened backyard. Through the left side of the window, I could see several other things contributing to my infatuation for her: she turned on the television with her left hand though she was right-handed; she used only two fingers to type on her laptop though at school I had seen her type with all ten in a computer science class; she often crossed and recrossed her legs in varying ways, as if she knew she was being studied and wanted to look most presentable.

The reason I know I’m not crazy is that I’m aware this is very unusual behavior. I’ve read books and seen films about people who do such things as this—stalk—yes, I can say the word. In these fictional tales, the characters always seem to think what they are doing is not morally wrong or that it is normal or that it is only a justification of their obsession with said person. Really, all their stalking ever turns out to be is a conviction of their own obvious delusion. I will not sit here and try to excuse you from the honesty that I was carefully stalking a girl. I have no good reason. I won’t bore you by trying to justify it. That would not be very interesting.

* * * On Saturday mornings her family goes to the farmer’s market, and because she began losing interest in her social circles—or perhaps because they had lost interest in her—Lacie started accompanying her parents. When they go, they leave the door unlocked.

Her diary said that she hated being alone through this. It said that the worst part was having to think she would have to meet someone new and discuss the issue from the start. There would be no joy in the first dates—only the anxiety of having to unveil such personal information to someone she barely knew. It was a paradox (she used the word correctly; she really was a very astute young girl), and she wrote that she could not afford to not have that talk early in a relationship, but that having the talk would keep any development in said courtship from occurring.

This is where I got the courage to do what I did.

I thought putting a note in a girl’s locker was a little cliché. Anybody can do that. In fact, quite a few people do it even when they have only lukewarm feelings for a person. After the third period gym class it is unlocked and unoccupied. And so instead of a hallway locker I put my letter into her locker in the girl’s changing room. It said, “You are loved. And if you are interested in knowing by whom, then wear your hair parted on the right side tomorrow.”

Lacie always parted her hair on the left—and always with either a black or red fine-tooth comb before blow-drying and straightening it for roughly twelve minutes. And because I knew that, I thought this was a simple request.

The next day her hair was parted on the left. I won’t try and pretend I wasn’t hurt. I also can’t say that I was surprised. You see, my mind was functioning perfectly all the time.

However, one day later, Lacie’s hair was parted to the right. I don’t care why she parted her hair that way, just that she did it.

The next note I put in her gym locker said I was someone she saw every day but never spoke to. I gave small details about myself: that I had three grey hairs on the back left portion of my hair, that I was four inches shorter than my father, that I had exactly ten freckles on my right arm as opposed to only two on my left. And the final clue I gave was that I could not keep from looking at her.

To see her look toward me in our common classes was an excitement I have never known. To be able to ignore her glances or to meet her eyes—and look at her as if she were the strange one—carried a weighty power I indulged in. But upon seeing that mousey retreat into herself I felt more pleasure than guilt in seeing her isolation increase.

Next, I sent a series of notes all requesting she meet at certain locales. The first of which asked for her simply to stand in front of her house at eight o’clock at night. I felt eight was a reasonable time between dinner (usually conducted in the Bauer residence at six-thirty and concluded by seven-thirty) and when her parents went to sleep (ten o’clock at the latest if they were not making love which, I noticed from the tree in their backyard, occurred sporadically less than once a week).

She came out until eight thirty-two—standing with perfect posture the entire time. The desperation resonated on her cheeks gorgeously as I watched with binoculars from behind bushes down the street. I never showed.

The next note I left was placed into her hallway locker, not her gym locker. It stated that I was sorry that I had been unable to arrive as I meant to. I told her how pitifully upset at myself I was, of how I would never again leave her wanting me without being there for her.

The note begged for her to meet me in the parking lot of our school the next day at midnight. If she could get out of the house it would truly be a sign of commitment.

She showed. I hid.

Perhaps if she had remained confident and dignified through the process—held her head high in school and kept her chin up, as they say—then she would have maintained a veneer which wouldn’t have allowed honesty. But she walked with her condemned gait nonetheless, scooting down the hallways with a very purposeless walk, and you could read pain in her chapped lips when she slept, in the way she put on the same dull pink nail polish, or the way she applied the ointment to treat her mistake of sleeping with Rob O’Connor, in the way she knelt into tears in the middle of rearranging the posters on the wall, and in the way her handwriting became more stilted, more rigid in the dates after she found out. In her diary she still dotted her Is and Js with hearts, which I saw as the saddest thing of all.

* * * My next note held no apology, but requested that she meet me in a park which was roughly an eighteen minute walk from her house (when taking into account the fact that her steps tended to be short, and her walk was unrushed, that she is five feet and four inches tall and that she weighed one hundred and seventeen pounds according to her last physical checkup, a copy of which was stashed in her desk in what might have been an attempt to keep the news of her disease from her parents).

She not only came but was nine minutes early. I watched her stand there with her loneliness and desperation, checking her watch just seven times in slightly over an hour (sixty-eight minutes)—averaging, respectively, a mere .206 looks per minute. She stood for the bulk of the time, sitting once, but only briefly and drawing a few designs in gravel by the swing-set. Her posture was no longer perfect.

From afar I looked at her features, not admiring them so much as taking them into consideration: her light hands in front of her holding her small purse, her twice pierced ears, her running nose causing her to sniffle every so often, a lower lip redder than the upper, a stance that made her shoulders uneven. I suppose she was pretty but that’s not why I was there. It made me think, If you were anyone less damaged I’d have no interest in you.

I would like to say I regret putting her through more emotional pain—rejection and desertion—but the only thing I regretted was that I could not see exactly what shapes she had drawn in the gravel and whether or not she had written both our names. Perhaps she had written them with a heart over i. Of course she did not know mine, making such a hope impossible. But hopes are rarely based on facts.

I left one more note the next day. There was no apology. It stated only, “Do it again.”